Rose Under Fire

I would have liked this book better if it was a standalone rather than the second book in a series that began with Code Name Verity. (And make no mistake that Wein did not intend this to be a series; the books are listed as such on her website.) Few of the characters from [Code Name Verity] appear

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here, and only one (Maggie Broadatt) has a role of any significance. And that role could have been just as ably filled with a new character. As the second book in a series, it falls short because the connections are too tenuous or underexplored. As a standalone, this book is a fairly harrowing glimpse into the horrors of the Nazis' Ravensbrück concentration camp for women.

Our protagonist is Rose Justice, a plucky American 18-year-old who graduates high school early so she can come to England and be part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, civilian pilots who ferry planes back and forth mostly within England but sometimes closer to the front lines. The early part of the novel tells the ATA story for anyone who has not read Code Name Verity; if you read the first novel this part seems slow and repetitive, while not giving as much insight into Rose's character as one would hope. I was never quite convinced that such a young woman, and an American at that, would have been given such an important role. (There's a quasi-explanation that I found unconvincing, to say the least.) And there's no indication that there are any other Americans in the ATA; at least Rose never talks to them, making her seem all the more out of place.

The plot twist that sends Rose's story in another direction seems both contrived and ham-handedly foreshadowed, but if you can swallow that anomaly, the section set inside the concentration camp is gripping and seems to be meticulously researched while still being fictionalized. One of the women she makes the strongest connection to is a young Polish girl also named Rose, who suffered enormously through sadistic medical experiments by the camp doctors. The section is told through flashbacks, a storytelling decision that I questioned at first because it removed much of the tension of what Rose's ultimate fate would be. Later I came to think the time bouncing was necessary to alleviate the unrelenting misery and pain of the camp scenes. And I liked that the book went beyond liberation to give a glimpse of what camp survivors struggled with when returning to "normal" life.

On some level, there can never be too many stories telling the world about the horrors of the Holocaust. And the perspective of detailing what happened at a place that began as a simple work camp rather than wholly for execution, was one that was new to me. For the target young-adult audience, this would likely be a very powerful introduction to what World War II meant on a very human level.

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