osprey_archer | Book Review: Stateless

Elizabeth Wein has a new book out! It’s called Stateless and

skygiants wrote an excellent entry about it and my review here is a reworking of my comment over there, which might be summarized, “Good thriller, shame about everything else.”

A quick non-spoilery summary: Stateless takes place during a youth air race in 1937 Europe, meant to promote peace among nations. There are twelve fliers representing twelve European states. Our heroine and narrator, Stella North, the only girl pilot in the race, is representing England even though she’s actually a Russian refugee on a Nansen passport. And on the very first leg of the race, she sees one plane force another out of the sky…

Stateless is first and foremost a thriller, and on that level it works well. It takes a few chapters to get going, but once Stella herself is attacked in the air, I was more or less glued to the book to the end, desperate to learn who was attacking the pilots and why.

However, the book has much bigger ambitions than merely being a competent thriller, and unfortunately I felt that it fell down on them. As

skygiants says, Stateless definitely wants to say something about refugees and borders and the tragedy of nationalism, but it never quite lands. Sometimes it's a little too on the nose, like the bit where Stella's flying over the old trench lines and more or less explains The Tragedy of War for us. Other times, the intended beats don't hit like they should, because the character work is just not strong enough to support them.

Stella herself is not particularly vivid, and most of the other flyers are barely more than a name and a nationality. Why yes, having about two-thirds of the cast primarily defined by their nationality does seem contrary to the Tragedy of Nationalism theme, but they simply don’t have any other characteristics for readers to hang a hat on. About halfway through the book I gave up on sorting out everyone but our main guys.

Admittedly, twelve flyers is a LOT of characters to deal with, but school story authors carry off casts of this size with aplomb all the time, so it could have been done. And because so many of the characters are ciphers, the heart-warming moment where they all come together to protect Tony and then Sebastian is just not that heart-warming. Friendship transcending nationalism can't bear any thematic weight if there's no substance to the friendship because the individual friends are barely more than names.

(Tony is the love interest. Like Stella, he is a stateless refugee, a third culture kid who has grown up in many different nations. He also labors under an incredibly whumpy backstory, and look, I get that whump writers gotta whump, but when we got to the fifth layer of whump it began to feel excessive, especially given that Stella herself only gets a single defining whump! (As a toddler, she was trapped alone in a basement apartment for five days after the Cheka arrested her parents in the night.) Perhaps there should have been some more whump parity. Maybe parcel some whump out to some of the other flyers to make them a bit more memorable.

I feel a bit bad for panning the book like this, because it is so clearly and earnestly trying to say something about nationalism and the Brotherhood of Man and war looming over Europe that is just as applicable today, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as it was in 1937. Wein even says as much as in the author’s note! But sometimes one earnestly attempts and just as earnestly fails.