2013 book 152

Elizabeth Wein's Rose Under Fire
Sooooooo Elizabeth Wein has written a companion/sequel to Code Name: Verity (which quickly became one of my favorite books). This one centers on American Rose (more specifically, the Pennsylvania Dutch Rose--sooo many references to Hershey PA!), who gets a job in England as one of the civilian pilots transporting planes and befriends one of the characters from Verity (saying who is a major spoiler for that book, so I won't). But then her plane is captured by Germans and she's sent to Ravensbruck.

Look, this is an excellent concentration camp book. Wein's writing is powerful, her characterizations are great, and she has a real gift for writing about female friendships. She doesn't shy away from any of the camp atrocities either (and goes into a lot of detail on the medical experimentation that went on). It's just that I have read a large number of concentration camp books in my life, and so none of this was really surprising to me. Verity had me on the edge of my seat the whole time, but here, we know who lives from the beginning, and so it's a little bit less intense (if a concentration camp book can ever be "less intense"). Maybe I should say it's less suspenseful. Still an excellent read and a great companion novel, and I guess I'm glad people are still writing GOOD and POWERFUL concentration camp novels for YA audiences that don't feel exploitative.  I just didn't fall for it as hard. Though, to be far, it is rare for me to fall for any book as hard as I did for Verity. A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.