sync this week: Code Name Verity and The Hiding Place

Sync's offerings this week (Thursday, June 12 through Wednesday, June 18, 2014) are:

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
and
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Bloom, with John and Elizabeth Sherril

Oct. 11th, 1943 — A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.
When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn't stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she's living a spy's worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.
As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage, failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?

The edition of Code Name Verity offered by Sync is narrated by Morven Christie and Lucy Gaskell, courtesy of Bolinda Audio. I highly recommend that you download this book. You can read by review of Code Name Verity in this post.

The amazing story of Corrie ten Boom, a heroine of the Dutch Resistance who helped Jews escape from the Nazis and became one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20th century, is told in her classic memoir, now retold for a new generation.

The edition of The Hiding Place offered by Sync is narrated by Bernadette Dunne, courtesy of Christian Audio.

Go here to get this week's downloads.

Note: these books don't expire like the e-audiobooks you get from the library. So, be sure to download the books even if you don't think you'll get around to listening to them right away.

More information about Sync and this year's schedule of offerings is available in this post.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Code Name Verity will be released a bit later this month. I've just finished reading a review copy and I adored it. I'm putting a hard copy on my wishlist and I'll be buying copies to give as gifts. Such a good book.

I don't want to spoil the plot so I won't say much about it. Code Name Verity is a work of historical fiction. The action occurs primarily in Nazi-occupied France. One protagonist is a pilot. The other begins the novel imprisoned in a hotel that had been converted into a Gestapo headquarters.

Don't be put off by the novel's slow start. While Code Name Verity is by no means a quick read, the pace quickens and the story becomes increasingly engaging until the reader is so invested in the characters that she simply must find out what happens to them. Code Name Verity is not always easy to read, but that's because horrible things happen during wartime.

With two teenage protagonists, Code Name Verity is being marketed as a young-adult novel, but there is much to recommend it to a wider audience. Strong female characters, an effective split narrative, action and adventure, double-agents and double entendres, and moments of shock and awe, topped off by a realistic setting and storyline complete with bibliography.

Note: The image I've included in this post is the cover of the UK edition (published in February), which I like much better than one designed for the US edition.

disclosure: I received a review copy of Code Name Verity from Disney Hyperion via NetGalley.

The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock

The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock

We talk about getting away and seeing the world, but we never do. We stay here making the same mistakes, over and over. (8)

The Book of Lies opens in late 1985 with 15-year-old Cat Rozier admitting that she's murdered her best friend, Nicolette. Her narrative then begins to chart the short history of Cat's tumultuous relationship with Nic. Cat's written confession is interspersed with pages of documents that Cat found in her late father's office. Those documents tell the story of Cat's uncle Charlie, "who got in trouble with the Germans and ended up being starved and tortured and driven mad. He only just survived the War and he was the reason Dad made himself an expert on said German Occupation" (27).

Cat is such a wonderfully real character, a teenager through and through. Self-satisfied and self-loathing by turns, Cat is angsty and witty, judgmental and clueless. She's also a bit of a drama queen, a snarky one. Her voice is so very authentic (and that can be very hard to pull off). One line in particular made me laugh out loud.¹

Some readers may be put off by the novel's format (split narrative with footnotes), but I thought it worked really well for the story Horlock was trying to tell.² And, while Cat and Charlie's stories are quite different, they parallel nicely.

The novel is also full of truisms. This one had particular resonance for me: "I suppose that's the thing about History, there are always several versions of that thing we call the truth" (213).

The Book of Lies is a strong debut for Horlock. I do hope that people people aren't Guernsied out after The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The Book of Lies does deal with occupied Guernsey, but it has so much more to offer (if nothing else the 1980s storyline deals with bullying). I know lots of book clubs read Guernsey Literary (mine included) and while I think that The Book of Lies would provide plenty of discussion fodder on its own, it would be a perfect follow-up for Guernsey Literary.

The Book of Lies will be released in mid July.

1. I'm not quite sure why, but I found this hysterical at the time: "Mr. McCracken asked after Mum and called her a 'trouper,' but I thought he said a 'grouper,' which is a fish. I replied that Mum didn't like water and hot climates" (30).
2. And, I do love footnotes

disclosure: I received a review copy of The Book of Lies from HarperCollins via NetGalley.

Briar Rose

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

It is an old, old tale, the German story of Briar Rose, the Sleeping Beauty. Now one of America's most celebrated writers tells it afresh, set this time in the forests patrolled by the German army during World War II. A tale of castles, of mists and thorns, of a beautiful sleeping princess, and an astonishing revelation of death and rebirth. A tale that will leave you changed forever. The tale of Briar Rose.

I was a bit worried that it was going to be too dark (given the subject matter), but I decided to read it anyway. Because of the way that the novel is structured, as readers we are somewhat distanced from the horror of the Holocaust. As it became a fairy tale for Gemma, so does it become one for us as we follow Becca on her quest. Even when the horrors are recounted we are shielded by layers of story and want to rush through that part to find out the solution to the mystery.

Unlike the other readers of my copy of the book (it's a BookCrossing book so I read their reactions), I was not disappointed by the ending (because I read their journal entries yesterday and so didn't expect a fantastic ending? maybe, maybe not). I honestly don't know what I would have changed about it. It may have been too simple after the journey, but isn't that how things happen in real life?

I'm definitely going to look up the other books in Terri Windling's Fairy Tale series (the first few books in the series were published by Ace including one by Charles de Lint, Jack of Kinrowan, which I know I read many years ago).

The Day of Battle

Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-44 by Rick Atkinson

The Day of Battle is divided in to four parts. In the first part, Atkinson covers the Sicily campaign. In part two, he covers the British 8th Army invasion of Italy at the toe, the invasion of the American 5th Army at Salerno, and the Allies' battles at the Bernhardt Line centred around the town San Pietro. In the part three, he covers the failed attacks to capture of the town of Cassino and the abbey on Monte Cassino as well as the Anzio invasion and the German counter attacks on the beachhead. Finally, Atkinson covers the breakout at Cassino and the Anzio beachhead as well as the capture of Rome.

It is not necessary to have read the first book in the Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn, to understand this second volume. If a person appears in the first volume, Atkinson reintroduces him in the second (though the information given at the introduction is not exactly the same).

When Atkinson writes about the battles, his descriptions are like better-written, less dry after action reports. He focuses the history on the command personal, the Allied and German generals (who he criticizes and praises equally); but he peppers that narrative with personal experiences from the enlisted ranks, lower ranked officers, and reporters showing how they viewed the events around them.

Atkinson ends the book at the traditional ending point of histories on the Italian campaign, with the fall of Rome. Only in the epilogue does he briefly cover the rest of the campaign until the war ends. This makes me wonder whether he will write about it the upcoming third volume. Atkinson already has a lot to cover in the third volume, starting with the preparations for D-Day, the Normandy campaign, the race across France, invasion of southern France, the Battle of Bulge and the fall of Germany; more, perhaps, that can be contained in one book.

This book is a great for what I call good general history, by which I mean that it gives a good overall history, but also has a bibliography that readers be used to learn more about the topic.

There are a couple small errors I noticed while reading The Day of Battle. On page 439, when Atkinson writes about monks of the Abbey of Monte Cassino contemplating the mysteries of the rosary, he includes the luminous mysteries, which were introduced Pope John Paul II. Additionally, on page 536, Atkinson refers to a historical battle occurring in the First Punic War with Hannibal, but Hannibal fought in Italy only in the Second Punic War.

My only other criticism is on how the references were handled in this book. Atkinson uses endnotes, which are grouped by page and marked by the first three words of sentences they are supporting. This made checking references slow and tedious; the reader can not see quickly the where the references are placed in the text. However, I really like the maps that are being used so far in this series.
On a small note, I finished this book on June 5th, the anniversary of the fall of Rome to the US 5th Army, the same point at which the book's narrative ends.

Reviewed by Russell Morse
I expect to be featuring Russell's reviews periodically on the blog (I've convinced him to start writing reviews), which should mix things up a bit as he tends to read different genres than I do.