This one is so hard to talk about without spoilers! There were at least three big plot points that took me by surprise, so I don’t really want to tell you anything. But I enjoyed 99% of this book, and I’m pretty sure I recommend it, even with that 1%.
To start with, Julie is a LADY SPY. She’s beyond great. Unfortunately, she’s been captured by the Nazis, and has been forced to write down secret codes. However, she keeps resisting in whatever small ways she can, like writing snarky things about her captors, filling up precious paper with lyrics and Scottish poems, and basically just treating the entire exercise like writing in a diary. She writes it mostly about her best friend Maddie, who is a LADY PILOT. Maddie was delivering Julie to occupied France when they had plane trouble. Julie had to parachute out into the unknown, and Maddie had to land/crash the damaged plane.
I loved the writing and the story, and I loved Julie and Maddie, and I loved so many things I can’t tell you about without spoiling anything. The cover of the book says it’s YA, but it just read like a regular book to me. I can’t keep track anymore of what counts as YA. There’s an author’s note at the end where she talks about researching the real-life women who were pilots and spies in WWII, and it’s super cool, even though Julie and Maddie themselves were fictional.
If you like journal-type adventure stories about kickass women, this one is definitely worth a look!
