Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein, 368 pages
Rose Justice is an American pilot and budding poet ferrying planes for the Air Transport Auxiliary in England towards the end of the second World War. She has only been there for about six months, but it has been long enough to make some friends, like Maddie, who gives her a beautiful journal when Rose was tasked with writing the report detailing what happened to their friend Celia when she crashed her plane. Interestingly enough, the mechanic looking at the crash believes that Celia was trying to ram a German bomb out of the sky, leading to the crash that kills her. So when Rose crosses paths with a similar bomb after ferrying her engineer uncle to France, she decides to try to do it herself and succeeds. But in her determination to knock it out of the sky, she gets lost and attracts the attention of two German fighter pilots who capture her and eventually send her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp. There she meets French resistance fighters, a Soviet fighter pilot who happens to be a woman, and the Polish "Rabbits", a group of women who were subject to heinous experimental surgeries, who take her in, each of them working together to help each other survive.
Like Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein has written yet another heartwrenchingly wonderful book set during World War II that attempts to highlight some of the atrocities that occurred during that time. What Rose and the rest of her camp family endures in order to stay alive is horrific, but the bond that is forged between them feels real - you can tell that all of them would sacrifice themselves for the others, especially if it meant that the rest would be able to survive and tell the world what happened to them and especially the "Rabbits". I also like that Rose felt real. She isn't presented as just a girl pilot captured by the enemy and faced with potentially dying in a concentration camp - she was a Girl Scout, a varsity basketball player, and a high school graduate before all this happened to her. In fact, her knowing that she had a life before being captured helps frame her reactions and understanding of the others. She struggles with knowing that her camp family have been dealing with this hell while she was canoeing and taking her friends flying for fun, blissfully unaware of the true extent of what was going on in the war. While Rose Under Fire is a companion to Code Name Verity, you can read this one without knowing the events of Code Name Verity. But both are so excellent, so why would you not want to read them all?
(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Challenge)
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