Author: Elizabeth Wein
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: TBD
Well I have to rate this one as warty. I started it and could find nothing whatsoever in the first few pages to interest me. I started skipping pages because the last thing I was interested in was air-headed girlie gossip written in a totally unrealistic first person, when I'd picked up a novel that was touted as being about World War Two! No wonder Hyperion didn't want a reviewer like me to get hold of this novel! But their ludicrous attempt at half-hearted censorship failed; I waited patiently and now I've seen it and it's not good enough.
Wein's desire to publicize the horrors of World War Two is admirable, if very belated. That war was horrible, but it was almost three-quarters of a century ago. There are new horrors now, and there have been ever since World War Two. They are just as bad as what happened then, and on just as large a scale, if nowhere near as concentrated, and it's those horrors - the ones which are not so high profile but which are just as bad - ones about which we can do something now, which are in greater need of the publicity. So why isn't Wein focused on those if she wants to write a crusading novel?
I invite Elizabeth Wein and others to think of a number. Not any number, but a specific nine million. It could be the nine million children who have starved to death in 2013. It could be "merely" nine million kids who aren't insured by "the best country in the world" in 2013, and will not be insured if the god-fearing 'suffer little children to come onto me" Republican party has its way. It could be the nine million children who were refugees in 2013. It could be the nine million children who will die in 2013 before they reach their fifth birthday. Six million Jews and all the others slaughtered, harassed, bullied, belittled and degraded in a religious crusade between the mid-nineteen thirties and 1945 is awful. It must NEVER happen again; it must never be forgotten, but it was 70 years ago. That nine million (pick one; pick any one) is happening right now. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
Likewise, Wein's efforts to publicize the contribution women made to the war effort is commendable, but I don't think you get to where Wein thought she was taking us by starting from frivolity and nonsense. Not unless you're a more skilled writer than Wein showed herself to me to be, because in my case she certainly failed and failed dismally. I was turned off this from the start. She should have begun this story from the point where Rose takes off and gets herself captured, bypassing the fluff and frou-frou and making a much better impression on me. Clearly she doesn't care about impressing readers like me.
If she had at least made the capture an adventure, it might have turned it around, but she wasn't even interested in doing that much. The capture was poorly written. She has Rose captured by two Messerschmitt 262's, the Germans' only jet-powered World War Two aircraft. These cool-looking airplanes then casually escorted Rose across France and into Germany. Never once did she try to put her plane down on the ground or to jump out and let it crash, thereby keeping it and herself out of the hands of the Germans. Nope, she meekly let these same two planes - which had severely limited air-time because of the fact that they were gas-guzzling jets with two hungry engines - lead her like a whipped puppy all the way into Germany and she never so much as emitted a squeak of protest, much less demonstrated one. Not only is that length of a flight not gonna happen with that type of aircraft, even if it could have happened, I wasn't about to read a story about a supposed hero who gives up everything in a cowardly fashion without even thinking of any kind of a fight. Sorry!
At that point, after the cheery, pally conversation she had with her German captors, blabbing everything but her name, rank, and number, that I could not stand to read this crap any more, and I closed the book on Elizabeth Wein, who started out ostensibly championing women in World War Two and ended-up (or was it up-ended?) insulting the legacy of bravery of the very non-fictional women who did put in their time and serve their country. And the hero's name is Rose Justice? Honestly? I am done with Elizabeth Wein. This was a warty read.
