Month: April 2018

Title: Code Name Verity

Author: Elizabeth Wein 

Genre: Young Adult, Historical

Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity is the story of a British spy named Julie, or Queenie, or Verity; whichever one you prefer. Julie gets captured in 1943, Nazi-occupied France, where our story begins. Her captor, a man named Von Linden, gives her two weeks to give up as much information she can on the British war effort. Though, as Julie recounts, “the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France – and Allied Invasion of Two. We are a sensational team”. Thus begins a long story recounting how Julie and her pilot friend Maddie (code name Kittyhawk) came to meet each other and become friends. 

The story is really a wonderful depiction of how the war was from another perspective. So many times we hear the stories of the soldier who saved lives on the field, but it was really refreshing to hear it from Julie’s point of view. It paints an eerie picture of just how dark being taken prisoner during World War Two really was, and how much it can break someone’s spirit. Julie so quickly goes from making snarky and sarcastic comments to contemplating that “there’s no efficient way to kill yourself with a dressmaker’s pin (I wouldn’t call contracting gangrene an efficient way to kill yourself)—I puzzled over it for a long time, seeing as they’d left the pins there, but it’s just not possible”. The narrative switches from first person to third person quite a lot. The first person would be Julie recounting her times as a prisoner, and experiences such as her hair being washed with kerosene and commentary on her prison guard, Engel. The third person is of Maddie, talking about how she joined the war, how she met Julie (formerly Queenie), and how the two became part of the war effort. 

Another subject that it touches beautifully on is friendship. Julie and Maddie meet under impossible circumstances, and become the closest of friends. The admiration and adoration Julie has for Maddie is evident in the way she writes about her, never a word of disrespect is written. Julie’s statement of “It’s like being in love, finding your best friend” is the perfect way to summarize her feelings towards Maddie, and vice versa. It’s interesting to read how two individuals can find friendship among the times of suffering and war, and seeing their friendship grow is truly heartwarming. 

Personally, I really enjoyed this book. The beginning was a bit hard to get in to, as a lot of the military slang was new to me, but I was soon hooked. I’m not too sure if it was the suspense of Von Linden breathing down Julie’s neck, or the plot of Maddie and Julie becoming friends while also fighting in a war. The historical points in it were fascinating, and I actually learned quite a lot about women’s roles in the war, as well as how the technology had changed  from then to now. Overall, I would definitely recommend it for those who are up for reading something not entirely light hearted, but captivating and suspenseful at times.

Read you later,

Sincerely, Me

More DI! And I’m not going to explain the ominous title until later in the post because… suspense.

Anyways, unless you wanna do more reading than necessary, let me recap: I went to a tournament called DI with my team where we did an engineering challenge in which we had to drop weights into a structure. We also needed to include a dramatic impact, an even depicter that depicted said sudden event, and two team choice elements. We wrote a story about social anxiety in which I played the embodiment of anxiety and scared everyone. We got third place in our regional tournaments and moved on to provincials.

First, we had to change and improve some things. We fixed our background, and added in sound effects. School bell noises, mainly. We cut out some scenes, due to us going over time. We also improved makeup, like giving Michael freckles and Mimi wrinkles.

Provincials was… a time. Getting up at 7:00am on a Saturday wasn’t fun. We had our instant challenge at 10:00, but before that we marched into the gym.

Allow me to elaborate. We walked into the gym with this:

I can’t explain the monster I made. Do I start with Adam, who looks like a witch? Or Michael, who’s face I had to elongate? The fact that I look like a little boy on Chandler’s body? I can’t… I give up.

Instant challenge went well, though I’ve been told we can’t talk about it. There’s no legal punishment if I do, but my teacher reads these and I’d rather not have her get mad at me. Sorry.

Moving on to the main event: our team challenge. Tender Greens walked into that room with confidence. We set everything up, it was going awesome. I looked like a raccoon. I have no photos to capture the true beauty of it, so here’s a drawing I did:

Anyways. We had all the confidence in the world. Then… it was shattered. Let me go into more detail.

Scene one: Chad and Claire talk about homework. Chad, upon exiting, trips over the wire. No big deal

Scene two: Ths school bell doesn’t ring. Fine, we can handle it. Everything goes fine.

Scene 3: Doesn’t work. At all. This is supposed to be a filmed phone call scene projected onto our background. No audio, nothing. Nãda. Zilch.

Scene 4: Oh dear. Claire goes up to do her presentation, in which Anxiety (played by Myself) drops weights on the structure while Claire builds up to a panic attack. The structure decided our story was bad and snapped under pressure. Literally. One weight made it break.

 

THIS IS WHERE THE TITLES COMES INTO PLAY. While thinking of a title, I got really bummed because Breaking Chad would make EVEN MORE sense for this because something actually broke! Not Chad, he’s not mangled, he’s in one piece.

Needless to say, we were all disappointed. But, you know what, I learned a few things. I always talk about this, but I learned about team work. This group in particular proved that dividing and conquering sometimes work, but not always. It was easy to trust Adam to work on the structure, but I needed help with the story. I also learned, as they say in show biz: the show must go on. If things don’t work out, roll with it. Our phone call scene didn’t work, so we rolled with it.

Let’s get nerdy about DI!

More nerdy than usual. There’s a study out there that talks about student engagement and creative attitudes among students who go into DI versus those who don’t. People who do DI were actually more engaged andcreatuvewhen given tasks, and more imaginative then those who didn’t do DI. They were more self-confident and tenacious, and were able to think of more ideas. A whopping 86% of DI students thinkthat their teamwork skills improved in the 1-2 years of participation they did, and 92% agree that problems can be solved with multiple perspectives. Really cool, huh?

Anyways, read you later!

Sincerely, Me