Booktalk This! Spy stories

I’ve had spies on the mind this week, as one of my favorite books of last year, Code Name Verityby Elizabeth Wein, received a Printz Honor (an award recognizing excellence in teen literature). In Code Name Verity, a young female spy writes for her life, sharing secrets with her German torturers in France during World War II. She confesses codes and airbase locations, but makes her captors find those details in a story of a friendship between two women who never would have met if not for the war. Catch glimpses of a side of WWII you don’t hear about often – female pilots and spies, the regular citizens who risked their lives helping the French Resistance, awful torture methods used on prisoners of war – but stay for a heart-wrenching story of friendship.

Is spy school your fondest wish? Read your way to the Gallagher Academy with Cammie Morgan, the heroine of Ally Carter’s I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You. Cammie’s mom is headmistress of the school, which pretends to be for geniuses but teaches its students code-breaking, covert operations, and martial arts…so, yeah. It’s a spy school. And it’s rad.

Filed under: Ally Carter, Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein, Gallagher Girls, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Mission: Read, Spies, Spy stories, The Squad