Code Name Badass: The True Story of Virginia Hall - Hardcover

Demetrios, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 153443187X ISBN 13: 9781534431874

Verlag: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

“Bringing together rigorous research and a vibrant writing style” (School Library Journal), Code Name Verity meets Inglourious Basterds in this riotous, spirited biography of the most dangerous of all Allied spies, courageous and kickass Virginia Hall.

When James Bond was still in diapers, Virginia Hall was behind enemy lines, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Hitler’s henchmen. Did she have second thoughts after a terrible accident left her needing a wooden leg? Please. Virginia Hall was the baddest broad in any room she walked into. When the State Department proved to be a sexist boys’ club that wouldn’t let her in, she gave the finger to society’s expectations of women and became a spy for the British. This boss lady helped arm and train the French Resistance and organized sabotage missions. There was just one problem: The Butcher of Lyon, a notorious Gestapo commander, was after her. But, hey—Virginia’s classmates didn’t call her the Fighting Blade for nothing.

So how does a girl who was a pirate in the school play, spent her childhood summers milking goats, and rocked it on the hockey field end up becoming the Gestapo’s most wanted spy? Audacious, irreverent, and fiercely feminist, Code Name Badass is for anyone who doesn’t take no for an answer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Demetrios is a critically acclaimed author, writing coach, and certified meditation teacher. She has an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a recipient of the PEN New England Susan P. Bloom Children’s Book Discovery Award for her debut novel, Something Real. Her novels include Little Universes, I’ll Meet You There, Bad Romance, as well as the Dark Caravan fantasy series. Her nonfiction includes the Virginia Hall biography Code Name Badass, and she is the editor of Dear Heartbreak: YA Authors and Teens on the Dark Side of Love. Her honors include books that have been named Bank Street Best Children’s Books, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selections, a Goodreads Choice Nominee, a Kirkus Best Book, and more. Find out more about Heather and her books at HeatherDemetrios.com.

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Chapter 1: Big Reputation
“When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.”1

GLENNON DOYLE

1 BIG REPUTATION 1931

To say Virginia Hall was ambitious would be an understatement.

She was that girl at your high school who makes everyone else look like a slacker, no matter how hard they’re working: a perfectly well-rounded résumé that would please any college admissions board, with a nice balance of extracurriculars and decent grades. Good family. Money. Fancy all-girls school. She was the class president who somehow managed to get the best part in the school plays (the villain, naturally), edit the yearbook, and rock it on the field hockey team.

This was the girl who’d get into Harvard but find it boring, choosing to ditch the hallowed halls of Cambridge in favor of studying abroad and sending home pictures of herself posing in front of castles and perched in gondolas with intriguing foreign men. Someday she’d receive prestigious awards from the president of the United States and the king of England. You know this girl—we all do. The girl who goes hard. Who’s hungry. Who makes things happen for herself. And you’re either the kind of person who loves her for it, admiring her swagger, or you hate her, jealous because she has the moxie to hustle for what she wants. Right here, right now, let’s decide to be Team Virginia. Let’s celebrate the hell out of a woman who would have left us all in the dust.

MEET YOUR NEW SHERO

Those who knew Virginia Hall best called her by her family nickname, Dindy. The name—bestowed upon her by her big brother, John2—suits our gal pal just fine: It’s scrappy, meant for someone who goes on adventures and has, as Jo March of Little Women might say, “a capital time.”


Dindy as a wee lass

Writing about a real-life spy is tricksy, given that most of the work an intelligence officer does is highly classified. While many former WWII spies became famous after publishing memoirs about the escapades they could spill about, Dindy remained tight-lipped until her dying day, in large part because she stayed operational for decades after the war.

I got my Nancy Drew on and decided to travel to Maryland and hang out with Dindy’s niece to do some proper sleuthing. I met Lorna Catling not long after I began my work on our gal in earnest and had a ball hearing old family stories, sifting through dozens of photographs, and ambling down memory lane. It was here that I got the best accounts of Dindy’s early life, long before she was a war heroine.

Her adventures really began when she finished high school, but a youth spent traipsing about her native Baltimore and romping around the countryside at her family home on the city’s outskirts, Box Horn Farm, set the groundwork for a lifetime of derring-do. Though the phrase has gone out of fashion—and with good reason—Dindy’s interest in so-called male pursuits and distinct lack of interest in being a proper lady branded her a “tomboy.” If there were a tree, she’d climb it. A horse, she’d ride it. A duck, she’d shoot it. Lest anyone think she couldn’t dominate in the domestic arts as well, Dindy learned how to make her own cheese. Her mother told Dindy nothing she ever learned to do would be wasted, and, boy, was Mrs. Hall right—one day, her daughter’s fromage habit would give her the cover she’d need to raise hell with the Nazis.



Dindy was especially close to her father, who had no problem with his daughter acting like one of the boys, despite the fact that she grew up in the prim and proper days of the early twentieth century. Dindy was born in 1906, which meant childhood photos of her included family members in corsets and bustled gowns. Old-school. Her family split their time between an apartment in Baltimore and their digs in the countryside.

When she wasn’t attending the Roland Park Country School, a somewhat posh institution that survives to this day, Dindy spent her early years going to movies at the Baltimore theaters her father invested in or goofing off on the farm with her brother, John. She milked goats, scrambled about the property, and got up to all kinds of antics—most photos of these years show her in trousers and knee-high boots, dressed more like a Prohibition booze smuggler than a lady of means.


Dindy and her brother, John

Class president, editor of the yearbook, yada yada yada: This was Virginia in the 1920s, at a time when most women who finished high school were discouraged from pursuing their studies or choosing a career; being a wife and mother was very nearly the only path offered to the well-bred ladies of Baltimore. Other paths, I imagine, included trying on hats, gossiping about the exploits of those flapper harlots, and batting one’s eyelashes at eligible bachelors. Virginia was having none of that. She wanted to be in the room where it happens, not on the sidelines while her man went off to do all the cool things. Dindy didn’t give two figs about marriage and babies and chiffon gowns. She craved adventure, much like her enterprising paternal grandfather, John W. Hall, who’d made the family fortune in shipping after running off to sea at the tender age of nine, stowing away on one of his father’s clipper ships and then becoming a captain himself one day. Fun fact: His granddaughter would be a captain too—in the US Army.

Virginia was beloved by her classmates (they called her the “Fighting Blade”3), her independence admired rather than frowned upon. She had big reputation, as evidenced by this description of Hall in her senior yearbook:

She is, by her own confession, cantankerous and capricious, but in spite of it all we would not do without her; for she is our class-president, the editor-in-chief of this book, and one of the mainstays of the basket-ball and hockey teams. She has been acclaimed the most original of our class, and she lives up to her reputation at all times. The one thing to expect from Dindy is the unexpected.4


Team player: Dindy is in the back row, second from right.

Barbara Hall was likely disappointed by her youngest child’s divergent ways. I suspect she’d been dreaming of marrying her only daughter off to a nice Baltimore society boy, visions of white gowns and babies in prams dancing in her head. Her own marriage to Edwin Hall had been a real coup, given that Ned, as most people called Dindy’s father, had been a wealthy banker—and Barbara his secretary. Ned’s parents had a fine town house in Baltimore, where they “lived high on the hog,” according to Lorna. The new Mrs. Hall had likely been hoping for a similar arrangement, but it was not to be: Ned was one of seven kids who had to share the inheritance, and as he struggled to hold on to the family’s fortune, Dindy’s mother found herself living in a rented apartment in Baltimore...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 153443187X
• ISBN 13: 9781534431874
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande