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SparkNotes: Of Mice and Men: Plot Overview

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A short summary of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Of Mice and Men.

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When "Verity" is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn't stand a chance.

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I'm in a bit of a predicament. Oh, it's not the predicament of a girl pilot who has crash-landed in occupied France during World War II, or of a girl spy who has been captured by the Gestapo, but it's still problematic. I have to review a book in which even the hint of plot summary could ruin everything.

"Code Name Verity," by Elizabeth Wein, is a fiendishly plotted mind game of a novel, the kind you have to read twice. The first time you just devour the story of girl-pilot-and-girl-spy friendship and the thrill of flying a plane and the horrors of Nazi torture and the bravery of French Resistance fighters and you force yourself to slow down, but you don't want to, because you're terrified these beautiful, vibrant characters are doomed. The second time, you read more slowly, proving to yourself that yes, the clues were there all along for you to solve the giant puzzle you weren't even aware was constructed around you, and it takes focus and attention to catch all the little references to the fact that nothing is what you thought. Especially while you're bawling your eyes out.

"I am a coward. I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was. I have always been good at pretending." This is how the book opens. Soon we learn our narrator is Queenie, the girl spy. She's Scottish, and she's been caught because she looked the wrong way (left, Britishly) while crossing a French street. She might have talked her way out of trouble - we quickly see she's charming, funny, flirty and has great nails - but for reasons that will become clear, she has no identification papers. She's imprisoned in the Château de Bordeaux, a once elegant hotel in a small city by a river in central France, now serving as a Gestapo headquarters. Captain von Linden, Queenie's captor, forces her to write her confession between bouts of torture carried out by a pale, pinch-mouthed deputy named Anna Engel. For as long as Queenie writes, she will be allowed to stay alive.

So Queenie unfurls the story of her friendship with the pilot, Maddie, interspersed with enough information about codes and airports to live for one more day, and another, and another. Commander von Linden, whom she compares to Captain Hook ("in that he is rather an upright sort of gentleman in spite of his being a brute"), is a cultured man who gets wrapped up in Queenie's story. When Fräulein Engel becomes impatient with what she sees as Queenie's pointless literary fancies, von Linden interrupts her.

" 'Fräulein Engel, you are not a student of literature,' he said. 'The English flight officer has studied the craft of the novel. She is making use of suspense and foreshadowing.' . . . Engel dutifully slapped me into silence and said: 'She is not writing a novel. She is making a report.' "

Well, yes and no. Through Queenie's writing - first on creamy hotel stationery, then in increasingly frantic scribbles on prescription forms bearing the name of a Jewish doctor, on sheet music once owned by a Jewish flutist and on recipe cards cadged from the Nazi cook - the reader, too, learns the story of the girls' blossoming friendship. Unlike the aristocratic Queenie, Maddie is a commoner. She's not gorgeous or smooth with men. But she's ethical, fierce and loyal, and we find out as Queenie does that she's a skilled pilot and a genius mechanic.

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I'm in a bit of a predicament. Oh, it's not the predicament of a girl pilot who has crash-landed in occupied France during World War II, or of a girl spy who has been captured by the Gestapo, but it's still problematic.

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Julie (codenamed Verity) is a spy with numerous false identities like Queenie, who is a "wireless operator" that becomes best friends with Maddie right from the beginning of the book. Then there's Eva Seiler, an identity she uses while she interrogates German prisoners as a helper for the Berlin Government to give/gain information.

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Many times in our lives, we go through problems not just by ourselves but with friends and family members. Like in the book, Julie and Maddie faced many problems together that put their lives at risk.They put their heads together and tried to solve those problems. That's how we should act when we know someone who is going through rough times. Stand up for that friend or family member. Even though Maddie killed Julie for a good reason, that doesn't mean you have to shoot your own friend or family member! It just means to do what it takes to make sure your friends and family are safe and sound!

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In the beginning of the book, Julie meets Maddie, who is a pilot that becomes best friends with her throughout the book. In one part of the book, Maddie was going to do the favor to drop Julie off in France but unfortunately Maddie crashes the plane. Luckily for Julie, she parachuted right before the plane crashed. After the crash, Julie is captured and becomes a prisoner of the Nazi Gestapo. While being imprisoned, Julie writes a confession of everything she knows. But any information that Julie has that would be of military use to the Nazis is kept in the story of her friendship with Maddie. Sadly, after the crash occurred Julie believed that Maddie was dead, but she wasn't! Maddie was placed in a group called Damask that helped her hide by giving her a false identity. As Maddie finds out that Julie was being transported with other prisoners, her and the people from Damask set up a plan to free the prisoners including Julie. Trying to free the imprisoned by causing an ambush, everything goes terribly wrong and what changes the whole story is that Maddie, planning to save her best friend, shoots Julie and kills before she could get tortured by the Nazis.

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Code Name Verity is a book about how two young women, Julie and Maddie form a friendship throughout the early years of World War II. As the story opens up, it's November 1943, just three years after the Germans invade France and both Julie and Maddie come face-to-face with many problems that puts their lives at risk.