Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein
May. 26th, 2014 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Tell the world.
“I can write again. Oh God! All those months of not being able to write! Of not being allowed to write. Knowing I’d be shot if I were caught. It seems like I have been a prisoner for so long.”
Rose Justice is a young American ATA pilot, delivering planes and taxiing pilots for the RAF in the UK during the summer of 1944. A budding poet who feels vividly alive while flying, she is forced to confront the hidden atrocities of war – and the most fearsome.
It’s August 1944, 8 months after CODE NAME VERITY. 18 year-old Rose Justice is an American pilot working in the ATA with Maddy who’s still mourning Julie’s death. Although excited to be playing her part in the war, Rose is slowly learning about the unfairness of war and it’s reflected in the poetry that she writes in her spare time. While flying a routine mission from France after D-Day, her plane is brought down by the Luftwaffe and she’s transported to Ravensbruck, a notorious concentration camp where she witnesses the horrors of what the Nazis have been doing and every day becomes a battle for survival …
Elizabeth Wein’s YA historical thriller is a companion novel to CODE NAME VERITY (although you don’t need to read that to follow this) that focuses on the horrific activities within Ravensbruck camp. Using historical sources (which are summarised in the author’s end notes) Wein shows the pointless medical experiments performed on Polish prisoners (known as Rabbits) and the everyday brutality meted out to the inmates, culminating in the construction and use of gas chambers. It’s another story of survival and the role that hope and determination plays in dragging people through incomprehensible events and the effects that such events have on survivors. It’s a powerful and effective novel and although there is a certain amount of (necessary) time jumps Wein never sugar coats her tale and never patronises the reader either.
There’s a lot of poetry in the book, which isn’t really my thing but does provide layers to Rose’s character and conveys the complicated emotions of what she’s going through. I particularly liked Rose’s journey from slightly naïve ingénue to witness of the very worst that humanity can deliver and some of the most effective parts of the books are where she constructs stories and fantasies to help the other women get through each day. The heart of the story is the friendships that form between the women in the camp, particularly Roza (a Polish Rabbit), Irina (a Soviet pilot) and Anna (probably the most complicated character in the book – a German prisoner who also aided in the experimentation) and I’ll admit to getting a bit teary when reading what happened to some of them.
All in all this is a brilliant YA novel that deserves to be on your radar and I look forward to seeing what Wein does next.
The Verdict:
Elizabeth Wein’s YA historical thriller is a companion novel to CODE NAME VERITY (although you don’t need to read that to follow this) that focuses on the horrific activities within Ravensbruck camp. Using historical sources (which are summarised in the author’s end notes) Wein shows the pointless medical experiments performed on Polish prisoners (known as Rabbits) and the everyday brutality meted out to the inmates, culminating in the construction and use of gas chambers. It’s another story of survival and the role that hope and determination plays in dragging people through incomprehensible events and the effects that such events have on survivors. It’s a powerful and effective novel and although there is a certain amount of (necessary) time jumps Wein never sugar coats her tale and never patronises the reader either.
“I can write again. Oh God! All those months of not being able to write! Of not being allowed to write. Knowing I’d be shot if I were caught. It seems like I have been a prisoner for so long.”
Rose Justice is a young American ATA pilot, delivering planes and taxiing pilots for the RAF in the UK during the summer of 1944. A budding poet who feels vividly alive while flying, she is forced to confront the hidden atrocities of war – and the most fearsome.
It’s August 1944, 8 months after CODE NAME VERITY. 18 year-old Rose Justice is an American pilot working in the ATA with Maddy who’s still mourning Julie’s death. Although excited to be playing her part in the war, Rose is slowly learning about the unfairness of war and it’s reflected in the poetry that she writes in her spare time. While flying a routine mission from France after D-Day, her plane is brought down by the Luftwaffe and she’s transported to Ravensbruck, a notorious concentration camp where she witnesses the horrors of what the Nazis have been doing and every day becomes a battle for survival …
Elizabeth Wein’s YA historical thriller is a companion novel to CODE NAME VERITY (although you don’t need to read that to follow this) that focuses on the horrific activities within Ravensbruck camp. Using historical sources (which are summarised in the author’s end notes) Wein shows the pointless medical experiments performed on Polish prisoners (known as Rabbits) and the everyday brutality meted out to the inmates, culminating in the construction and use of gas chambers. It’s another story of survival and the role that hope and determination plays in dragging people through incomprehensible events and the effects that such events have on survivors. It’s a powerful and effective novel and although there is a certain amount of (necessary) time jumps Wein never sugar coats her tale and never patronises the reader either.
There’s a lot of poetry in the book, which isn’t really my thing but does provide layers to Rose’s character and conveys the complicated emotions of what she’s going through. I particularly liked Rose’s journey from slightly naïve ingénue to witness of the very worst that humanity can deliver and some of the most effective parts of the books are where she constructs stories and fantasies to help the other women get through each day. The heart of the story is the friendships that form between the women in the camp, particularly Roza (a Polish Rabbit), Irina (a Soviet pilot) and Anna (probably the most complicated character in the book – a German prisoner who also aided in the experimentation) and I’ll admit to getting a bit teary when reading what happened to some of them.
All in all this is a brilliant YA novel that deserves to be on your radar and I look forward to seeing what Wein does next.
The Verdict:
Elizabeth Wein’s YA historical thriller is a companion novel to CODE NAME VERITY (although you don’t need to read that to follow this) that focuses on the horrific activities within Ravensbruck camp. Using historical sources (which are summarised in the author’s end notes) Wein shows the pointless medical experiments performed on Polish prisoners (known as Rabbits) and the everyday brutality meted out to the inmates, culminating in the construction and use of gas chambers. It’s another story of survival and the role that hope and determination plays in dragging people through incomprehensible events and the effects that such events have on survivors. It’s a powerful and effective novel and although there is a certain amount of (necessary) time jumps Wein never sugar coats her tale and never patronises the reader either.
