Emilie's Reviews > Code Name Verity

this is working so well, emily. i hardly ever read YA. do you have something else along these lines, equally gorgeous, to recommend?

*smiles* i'm happy verity is working so well! okay, now read To the End of the Land! it's not autobiography or ya, but i think it fits the pattern under the pattern. it's one of the most generous books i've ever read. it's gorgeous. he's a very talented and skillful writer so you will have that sense of being in good hands. (i know, too, it's outside the pattern cause it's written by a man, but for me, grossman is one of the very few male writers that mostly doesn't fall into the typical male writer problem things.) [also one of the central characters is a woman and she is so beautifully and lushly and complexly drawn.]

it's about trauma and loss and there is so much heart to it, and it is filled with a faith that there is still goodness, connection, love, hope, change...i can't think of how to word this right, but something truly worth fighting and living for, that these characters lives are unbelievably fucked up and filled with raw terror and pain and wrongness and isolation and yet...there is a beauty, a for lack of better phrase, a force of goodness/rightness that can be found even from a position of one nearly dead in life.

this is much darker and more intense than someone to run with, but has david grossman's same big hearted faith in people and in life and lack of contemporary focus on hip cool irony or detachment or sarcasm. he cares more about what will get him through the day than how he looks. and this one, even more than verity, has the movement through, the unthawing healing part.
the very beginning (20-30 pages maybe?) is written in a different literary style than the rest. i loved it, it's maybe more poetic and not as straightforward a storytelling style and it sounds like you might not be in the mood for that, but wait it out, i really think you'll love this book. he really gets the deep pain, the pain so extreme that one character retreats from the world and lives in a near frozen state, and he really gets complexity and it's just so so good, it's so filled with life, it sings and overflows with life and light and love and faith, and all this amid so much intense pain and trauma and loss of many different kinds. i want to hand this book to you right now. it saves me.

okay. done.