osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2013-10-15 12:06 am
osprey_archer) wrote2013-10-15 12:06 am
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Book Review: Rose Under Fire
Rose Under Fire! It’s not quite as gut-punchingly brilliant as its companion novel Code Name Verity, but it’s still bloody good, and the audiobook is excellent - although not something you’d want to listen to on your commute! I kept tearing up when I listened, not so much about the big horrors but about the little things: homesickness, the Nick stories, Róża being Róża.
I think the reason Rose Under Fire didn’t grab me quite like Code Name Verity is because almost all of it is written after the fact. Of course it had to be - there’s no way Rose could keep a diary in Ravensbruck - but it means that the story is less suspenseful: Rose knows who lives and who dies, and the way she writes tends to warn the reader in advance.
We also know, unlike Rose, that her boyfriend Nick has already moved on - and married! - someone else. It’s probably good that we find out in advance, because it might be just too infuriating otherwise, even though he had good reason to believe she was dead, and even though I think it is ultimately for the best. Nick is not a very strong man; I don’t think he could have kept up with pre-Ravensbruck Rose, and he’d be able to deal with traumatized but adamantine post-Ravensbruck Rose even less.
And I think it’s telling that Rose uses Nick as the centerpiece of her stories, rather than talking about her home in Pennsylvania: she likes Nick, but she doesn’t love him, so thinking about him isn’t as unspeakably painful as thinking about her home.
While I’m still behind spoiler cut: I was so glad to see Anna Engel again. She’s done all these terrible things - and yet had all these terrible things done to her, as well -
I don’t really know what I want to say about Anna. But I hope Rose does get to take her flying someday. Although Róża might have something to say about that.
Róża! Róża is Rose’s Polish friend, and I love her, I love her so much. She’s so angry and fierce and sometimes cruel - the Christmas scene - they’ve worked so hard to get something even a little nice, and Róża can’t stand pretending that it is nice, throws a fit. She’s so terribly young: she entered the camp when she was fourteen, and there’s a sense that her emotional development arrested at that age. She can laugh at anything: she’s sublimely brave - in the old sense of sublime, as something fathomless and frightening yet beautiful.
I love how she and Rose and Irina and Carolina and Lisette and - gosh, there are so many of them - how they form a web; how they try so hard to support each other, despite having so terribly little. They steal scraps of paper to make each other presents. Irina makes paper airplanes, Carolina (who wants to be an animator and demands that Rose tell her the story of Fantasia) flip books with little stories in them. Rose invents poems.
I love Rose’s poems. I particularly love the one she writes about the bright red nail polish on her toes, left over from her last date and, to the starving girls in camp, most edible looking, and the one about hope - the reworking of Emily Dickenson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers.”
There’s something here, about creativity as a survival strategy. Despite their bleak surroundings and their lack of supplies, they have to make things. It seems unnecessary for survival, but having a goal beyond just getting food holds them together.
I think the reason Rose Under Fire didn’t grab me quite like Code Name Verity is because almost all of it is written after the fact. Of course it had to be - there’s no way Rose could keep a diary in Ravensbruck - but it means that the story is less suspenseful: Rose knows who lives and who dies, and the way she writes tends to warn the reader in advance.
We also know, unlike Rose, that her boyfriend Nick has already moved on - and married! - someone else. It’s probably good that we find out in advance, because it might be just too infuriating otherwise, even though he had good reason to believe she was dead, and even though I think it is ultimately for the best. Nick is not a very strong man; I don’t think he could have kept up with pre-Ravensbruck Rose, and he’d be able to deal with traumatized but adamantine post-Ravensbruck Rose even less.
And I think it’s telling that Rose uses Nick as the centerpiece of her stories, rather than talking about her home in Pennsylvania: she likes Nick, but she doesn’t love him, so thinking about him isn’t as unspeakably painful as thinking about her home.
While I’m still behind spoiler cut: I was so glad to see Anna Engel again. She’s done all these terrible things - and yet had all these terrible things done to her, as well -
I don’t really know what I want to say about Anna. But I hope Rose does get to take her flying someday. Although Róża might have something to say about that.
Róża! Róża is Rose’s Polish friend, and I love her, I love her so much. She’s so angry and fierce and sometimes cruel - the Christmas scene - they’ve worked so hard to get something even a little nice, and Róża can’t stand pretending that it is nice, throws a fit. She’s so terribly young: she entered the camp when she was fourteen, and there’s a sense that her emotional development arrested at that age. She can laugh at anything: she’s sublimely brave - in the old sense of sublime, as something fathomless and frightening yet beautiful.
I love how she and Rose and Irina and Carolina and Lisette and - gosh, there are so many of them - how they form a web; how they try so hard to support each other, despite having so terribly little. They steal scraps of paper to make each other presents. Irina makes paper airplanes, Carolina (who wants to be an animator and demands that Rose tell her the story of Fantasia) flip books with little stories in them. Rose invents poems.
I love Rose’s poems. I particularly love the one she writes about the bright red nail polish on her toes, left over from her last date and, to the starving girls in camp, most edible looking, and the one about hope - the reworking of Emily Dickenson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers.”
There’s something here, about creativity as a survival strategy. Despite their bleak surroundings and their lack of supplies, they have to make things. It seems unnecessary for survival, but having a goal beyond just getting food holds them together.
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I will never be over Róża. I am so hoping there's a ton of Róża fic this Yuletide, because I want to see what happens next for her - and for it to be good, but not to paper over the fact that she's tremendously traumatized (and also sometimes a difficult person).
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WRT Flygirl, I was so mad we didn't have a copy of it in our teen section that I had to order one for us. Because that book is a necessity.
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And all libraries should have copies of Flygirl. That book has ALL THE THINGS.
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I am still working on my letter (I was delayed by people on Tumblr being WRONG about fashion history), but I will post it tomorrow! Basically it's Rose & Róża in Edinburgh being a family.