Both CODE NAME VERITY and BOMB are set during WWII.  The first is historical fiction, the second is creative nonfiction.  Both the setting and the genres are dear to me.  Both books were meticulously researched, and both books held me spellbound to the end.

CODE NAME VERITY is told in the first person present tense.  An unnamed woman is a prisoner-of-f.  She is a spy for the UK (not British, but Scottish – a point she insists on), who landed in a small town in Nazi-occupied France, and got caught almost immediately upon arrival because she looked the wrong way when she was crossing the street.  She is writing an account of everything that happened leading up to her being caught, from the very beginning of her involvement in the war effort.  When she finishes that account, she is quite sure the Nazis will no longer have any use for her, which means she will be killed.  In the pages she scrawls, she describes at length how Maddie, a British girl, came to learn to fly an airplane and wound up joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as a radio operator.  Events conspired to place Maddie in the chair at the airstrip when a damaged plane called in, “Mayday, Mayday…” It was a young German pilot who was so lost, he thought he was landing …

» Continue Reading: Round 2, Match 1: Bomb vs Code Name Verity