Queenie and Maddie are best friends who meet during WWII, Maddie a pilot and Queenie a secret agent. The book is written in two sections, the first through confessions by Queenie while in captivity and the second by Maddie in her journal.

A bit of a surprise, I thought I would like this book a lot more than I did. I had a hard time following along initially and once I managed to work through what was happening, I found myself a bit uninterested.

Luckily the second part of this story does pick up and I did enjoy this section better, though it felt too little too late. ( )

Even by the point that I wasn't feeling female spies in the world wars any more, I still really enjoyed this. What stuck with me were the strong and nuanced female characters and their deep friendship. ( )

Yes, this is another one of those books about brave women operating during World War II. However, I think there are lots of stories about that period of (relatively) recent history still to be told. Although this book is not based upon real persons, real women who carried out the jobs of the two main characters did exist. Sometimes you really can't make this stuff up.

The book starts off with the memoir of Special Operations officer Julia Beaufort-Stuart written while she was held in prison by the Nazis. Julia, usually shortened to Julie, and sometimes called Queenie, sometimes Eva Seiler and code-named Verity, was Scottish (never, never call her English) from an upper class family. She had studied at a Swiss private school before the war and thus was fluent in German and French. Because of these qualities and her training she was flown to France to head up a Resistance group aimed at destroying the Nazi headquarters where she is being held prisoner. She was tortured and gave up wireless codes for the equipment that was found in the plane that crashed just after she parachuted out of it. In return for getting her clothes back she has promised to write down all the war information that she knows. Admittedly, she really doesn't know very much but she keeps writing what is essentially the story of meeting her best friend and the pilot of the plane, Maddie. Maddie grew up in Manchester and was always fascinated by engines because her grandfather operated a motorcycle shop. When a female pilot had to make an emergency landing near where she and a friend were picnicking, she became fascinated with flying. With the assistance of the pilot she helped she soon learned to fly and had enough hours to get her pilot's licence. When war broke out she wanted to fly but instead was put to work as a radar operator in a RAF field. Julie was working at the same field as a wireless operator. A lost German pilot had to be convinced their field was in France so Julie was brought into the radar room to talk him into landing. Maddie told her what to say and Julie put it into German. Soon they were fast friends and spending what little free time they had together. Julie and Maddie were soon on to other duties but occasionally their paths crossed and they cemented their close relationship. Maddie met Julie's brother, James, a RAF pilot who crashed into the North Sea and lost extremities to the frostbite he endured before he was picked up. The second half of the book is from Maddie's point of view. She fills in what happened after her plane crashed in what is her diary written at the time. I promise you there is lots to tell.

This book was initially published in 2012 by Penguin Teen. Due to the reception it has received since then Penguin reissued it in 2022. I was actually astonished that this book was aimed at teenagers because the writing doesn't pull any punches. On reflection, I think that is probably a good thing. Today's teenagers are substantially different that I was in terms of what they have been exposed to. They probably wouldn't be impressed by a book that tried to sugarcoat events. ( )

I was so looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I didn't like it as much as I'd hoped. The first part, Verity's version of Maddie's life, was boring. I just found it very dry. It got better in the second part when Maddie was telling her own story. I found it much more interesting and eventful.

The tone of the narrative in this historical fiction about two women during WW2 jarred on me, particularly in the first half. The "poor cowardly me" and recollections about fairly irrelevant (at least to the Nazis) history of her friend didn't mix well with the descriptions of the horrors of the prison & the tortures seen and feared.

Morven Christie and Lucy Gaskell did a fine job with the narration, but this book just wasn't for me. ( )