Nov. 22nd, 2013

meganbmoore: (the bletchley circle: ordinary)
This is a companion novel to Code Name Verity but one that can be read completely independently of its predecessor. It's apparently getting criticism for not being as good as Code Name Verity, but the narrative devices that made that one so popular aren't something a writer should try to do twice, especially in a related book. Rose Under Fire is a very good book on its own merit, though one I have some issues with.

The main character, Rose Justice, is an American pilot working as a courier who is captured and sent to Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp. Ravensbruck is real and...well, it was a concentration camp. If you aren't familiar with what went on there, please look it up. (Trigger warnings for...everything.) It's very much a concentration camp novel, but also one about women from different walks of life bonding and helping each other. It also addresses the aftermath of concentration camps for the survivors, both in terms of PTSD and what was expected of them after, such as having to recount their experiences in trials.

It's also a concentration camp novel in which there isn't a single Jewish character, and in which the Jewish people are barely mentioned. On the one hand, I find it endlessly frustrating that so much of modern culture and fiction tends to think that (A) the Holocaust is the only thing of note to ever happen to Jews, and (B) the Jews were the only ones who were persecuted and/or sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. But skipping over that altogether isn't exactly an improvement, IMO.

Then there's Rose. My criticism here is not of Rose herself (I like Rose and think she's a very good character!), but of the choice to use Rose. Ravensbruck is a real thing that happened to around 150,000 women, a high percentage of them Polish and Jewish, and only a few thousand of whom survived. To tell their story, we're given a narrator who is an educated, literate American girl who writes poetry and appears to be from a reasonably well off family. There may have been American women in Ravensbruck (I don't know) but theirs isn't the main story of Ravensbruck, and reading it, I couldn't help thinking that as bad as Rose's story was, those of the other women were far worse, and more representative of the real women in Ravensbruck.

It's a very good book and very worth reading, but should also be read with the knowledge that all the trigger warnings ever apply.

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