Black Dove, White Raven: A Chick Lit Wednesday Review

“They can make you stay, but they can’t make me go.”

Emilia and Teo have been in the soup together since their mothers first put them in an airplane as children.

After years of performing together as the Black Dove and White Raven, Rhoda finds herself alone when Delia is killed during a freak accident. Shattered by the loss of her best friend–her better half, her soul mate really–Rhoda clings to the dream Delia proposed just before her death: moving to Ethiopia where they could live together exactly as they liked without Delia’s son Teo ever being discriminated against because he is black.

When they finally get to Ethiopia, Em and Teo think maybe they can be at home there watching their mother, dreaming of flight and writing The Adventures of Black Dove and White Raven together. As long as Em and Teo have each other, they know they’ll be fine.

But Teo’s connection to Ethiopia runs deeper than anyone can guess. As war with Italy threatens to break out in the peaceful country, Em and Teo are forced to confront undesirable truths about their own lives and the legacies of their parents.

Em and Teo know they can depend on each other for anything, just like White Raven and Black Dove, but with so much changing neither of them knows if it will be enough to save themselves and the people they love in Black Dove, White Raven (2015) by Elizabeth Wein.

Find it on Bookshop.

Black Dove, White Raven is an engaging and fascinating story about a largely unknown setting and an often forgotten moment in history. Detailed historical references and vibrant descriptions bring the landscape of 1930s Ethiopia and the politics of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War to life set against the larger backdrop of a world on the brink of war.

Like Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire, this novel is an epistolary one comprised of letters, essays and notebook entries written by both Emilia and Teo. Interludes between their story come in the form of Adventures that Em and Teo wrote for their alter egos White Raven and Black Dove.

Within the story of Emilia and Teo dealing with the coming war and all of its trappings, Wein also provides flashbacks to Em and Teo’s childhood both in Pennsylvania and Ethiopia. These contrasts help to highlight the idyllic life that the family finds in Ethiopia. At the same time Wein also plays with the idea that equality doesn’t always mean perfectly equal by examining the different ways Em and Teo are treated in Ethiopia and the varied obstacles they face throughout the narrative.

Black Dove, White Raven delves into the grey areas in life as Emilia and Teo try to find their proper place in Ethiopia and also come to realize that Delia’s dream for them all was a flawed one even as their mother Rhoda continues to cling to it.

Throughout the novel, both Em and Teo also often refer to their stories about Black Dove and White Raven as they try to decide what course of action to take. Wein explores the ways in which both characters, particularly Em, can manipulate different identities to get what they need.

Both Em and Teo have distinct voices in their narrations. While Emilia is often rash and flamboyant, Teo is introspective and thoughtful. Their dynamic together underscores how best friends–and here the best family–help each other to be more and achieve more together than they would accomplish apart.

Black Dove, White Raven is a powerful, beautiful story of friendship, family and learning how to soar.

Possible Pairings: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black, The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken, The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough, All Fall Down by Ally Carter, Blackfin Sky by Kat Ellis, We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, The Weight of Feathers by Anne-Marie McLemore, I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson, I Am Princess X by Cherie Priest, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt, The Archived by Victoria Schwab, Nothing But Sky by Amy Trueblood, The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams, Paper Valentine by Brenna Yovanoff, How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr

Rose Under Fire: A Chick Lit Wednesday

Rose Justice is a poet and a pilot. Even though she has hours and hours more flight time compared to many male pilots, Rose finds herself working as an ATA pilot transporting planes that other (men) fighter pilots will eventually use.

Rose is an American with high ideals who wants to help. The war is terrifying, much worse than she ever could have imagined back home in Pennsylvania, but doesn’t that make it even more important that Rose help however she can?

Her course changes abruptly when a routine transport goes horrible wrong and Rose is captured by Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück–a notorious women’s concentration camp.

In the camp Rose finds unimaginable horrors and obstacles but also small moments of hope through the kinship and bravery of her fellow prisoners. Even as friendships are forged amidst small moments of resistance, Rose and her friends are unsure who among them will make it out of Ravensbrück alive in Rose Under Fire (2013) by Elizabeth Wein.

Find it on Bookshop.

Rose Under Fire is a companion to Wein’s novel Code Name Verity and set about one and a half years later. Rose Under Fire is completely self-contained but readers of both will recognize familiar characters.

Like its companion, Rose Under Fire is an epistolary novel told primarily from Rose’s journal. Snippets of famous poems (notably from Edna St. Vincent Millay) are included as well as poems Rose writes throughout her time in England and Ravensbrück.

Although this novel doesn’t have the same level of suspense as Code Name Verity it remains extremely well-plotted and poignant. And that is really all that can be said about the plot without revealing too much.

Wein once again delivers a powerhouse novel about World War II in this case shining a light onto the atrocities of the Ravensbrück concentration camp while highlighting the strength and persistence of the women who were imprisoned there.

As you might have guessed, Rose Under Fire is an incredibly hard read. The novel looks unflinchingly at the heinous “experiments” Nazi doctors committed against the Polish political prisoners known as “rabbits” from their time in Ravensbrück to the war trials in Nuremburg. While the story is important and powerful, it is not to be taken lightly and readers should be mindful of that before they pick it up.

Readers who are up to the task of a difficult read with darker subject matter will find a powerful story in Rose Under Fire with an incredibly strong and inspiring heroine at the center of its story.

Possible Pairings: Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie,  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, Traitor by Amanda McCrina, Tamar by Mal Peet, The Shadow Society by Marie Rutkoski, Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill, Paper Valentine by Brenna Yovanoff

*This book was acquired for review from the publisher at BEA 2013*

Author Interview: Elizabeth Wein on Code Name Verity

You’ve probably already heard of Elizabeth Wein what with her novel Code Name Verity receiving a Printz Honor last year. Her novel is one of my favorite reads from 2012 and also one of the best odes to friendship (not to mention an excellent historical novel) I’ve ever read. I could go on and on about this book–especially because I almost didn’t pick it up. The real clincher was when I (briefly) saw Ms. Wein when she came to sign stock at the bookstore where I worked. It wasn’t a long encounter. And I hadn’t read the book yet. But I picked it up very soon after that. Suffice to say I was dazzled by the story and the characters but also by how everything came together the more I read. Since then I’ve had the chance to meet Elizabeth in real life at BEA (regular readers might remember it was a highlight of my recap!) and also to “talk” to her sometimes on Twitter (twitter is magic). Today I’m absolutely thrilled to have Elizabeth Wein here answering some questions about her novel.

Miss Print (MP): Can you tell us a bit about your path as a writer? How did you get to this point?

Elizabeth Wein (EW): I’ve wanted to write children’s books (somehow they all morphed into YA) since I was seven and first started reading novels.  I wrote my first full length opus when I was eleven—it was about 25,000 words long!  It was a time-travel adventure in which a modern girl changes place with her great-great-grandmother for a summer.

I wrote another novel, which was utterly appallingly awful, when I was 15.  My best friend called it “the stupidest book she’d ever read.”  It was an epic fantasy and the denouement involved the heroine playing a flute with her nose.  I am not kidding.

About this time I was also a serious King Arthur fanatic and started inventing the epic journey which eventually became my first novel, The Winter Prince.

I wrote five “spin offs” to The Winter Prince—A Coalition of Lions, The Sunbird, The Lion Hunter, The Empty Kingdom and The Sword Dance (the first two have recently been reissued as e-books from Open Road Media, with the next three in the pipeline.  The Sword Dance isn’t yet published).  They were all originally published by Viking Children’s Books in the past ten years or so, but they weren’t getting very much notice, and my editor at the time suggested I write something a bit more mainstream.  Code Name Verity was the result.

MP: What was the inspiration for Code Name Verity?

EW: Actually, I devoured Holocaust and World War II literature when I was a kid, and when I was about twelve I made up (though never wrote down) a World War II epic which focussed on the fearful and dynamic relationship between a captured resistance teen and her Nazi interrogator.  I just needed the female pilot aspect to put the whole thing into motion over 30 years later!

MP: How did your own experiences as a pilot inform the story?

EW: Partly, the story exists because I got my pilot’s license in 2003 and wanted to learn more about the possibilities available to women pilots throughout history.   The ATA fascinated me.  I don’t think I’d have written this if I hadn’t learned to fly myself, but I should stress that my fictional pilots are much more accomplished than I am!

I think, if anything, it is being a woman in a mostly male-dominated arena that informs the story, and that is a piloting experience that hasn’t really changed much over the past century.  Women are still a minority in the air.

MP: Code Name Verity takes place during WWII and is filled with historical detail. What kind of research did it take to write about this time period? Did you learn anything that surprised you during your research?

EW: Well, I’d already done some of the research for a short story called “Something Worth Doing,” published in Firebirds Soaring (edited by Sharyn November).  It’s about a girl who disguises herself as her dead brother and becomes a Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain in 1940—she actually turns up again in a cameo in Code Name Verity as Theo, the Air Transport Auxiliary pilot who first tells Maddie about Lysanders and the Moon Squadron!

I first found out about the ATA, and the SOE (Special Operations Executive), when I was doing the research for this story at the Imperial War Museum in London.  I do a lot of library research whenever I write a book, but one of the things that was fun about researching Code Name Verity was that there was so much hands-on stuff you could get at—museums, ruined fortifications, period clothes and leaflets and logbooks and recipes, and of course, living people who experienced some of these events.  I went to a seminar at the Royal Aeronautical Institute and got to meet four women who had been ATA pilots themselves!

I kind of want to say that everything I learned surprised me.  I hate to admit this, but until I wrote Code Name Verity I hadn’t really taken on board the difference between an occupied nation, and a nation at war.  Because there is a really big difference.

One thing that made a huge impression on me was the scale of it all.  It’s just amazing how global World War II was – much more so than World War I.  I tried to get some of that across in some of the things Maddie says after she’s lived for a few weeks in Nazi-occupied France.

MP: What draws you to the historical genre as a writer?

EW: Really, it’s just these amazing stories.  I’m not drawn to the genre—I’m drawn to the amazing things that people did, and their ingenuity and their bravery, and I want to tell people about it.  Remember I said my first books were all King Arthur spin offs?  That’s not because it was historical.  It’s because I was madly in love with Arthur.

MP: This is a story about war and flying and suspense, but it’s also very much a story about friends. Did you always plan to have a strong friendship at the center of this novel?

EW: No!  It was only when I got the idea for the huge plot twist and the structure of the novel—I started out to write it and realized that in order for the climax to be effective, these girls were going to have to be real best friends.  So I sat down to construct their friendship.  And once I got going, the whole thing just turned into a huge celebration of friendship for me.  I used real incidents and emotions from my own life, and thought of so many of my own friends while I was writing it.  It was a joy to write because I was so wrapped up in capturing the essence of what it’s like to have a best friend.

MP: Without getting into spoilers, the narrative voice throughout Code Name Verity is fascinating. How did you go about capturing the right “voice” for your characters?

EW: I can’t really take credit for capturing Verity’s voice—her narrative pretty much wrote itself.  I know that’s a cliché, but honestly, she was so easy to write.  Essentially she speaks in the voice of my own journals, so although she’s not like me, she talks a lot like me.

The other narrative was harder to capture because it’s not as literary.  I had to keep checking myself and forcing myself to write in plain English.  Whenever I wanted to wax lyrical I found that using a metaphor about flight or engines usually worked very well!

MP: One of the most impressive things about this novel is how intricately the plot comes together. There are a few big twists and throughout the story there are moments where everything readers thought they knew is thrown into question (or even proven completely wrong). As a writer how did you go about pacing this story? How did you keep track of details? How did you decide at what point to reveal key points to the reader?

EW: Keeping track of details was hard.  I didn’t want to use a diary format but in the end I had to date the entries simply because they were so hard to place in context otherwise.  Then when I got to part 2, which has events taking place simultaneously with part 1, I had to construct a time line.  When I finished the manuscript I ripped it completely apart, rearranged it all in chronological order and read it through that way to make sure all the events aligned properly.

I pretty much knew instinctively what I wanted to reveal and when, but it wasn’t till I got to part 2 and started knocking down all the ducks I’d lined up in part 1 that it really became clear the framework was actually going to work.

MP: A companion to Code Name Verity is coming out soon. What can readers expect in Rose Under Fire?

EW: We’ve got a new (and younger) heroine, Rose Justice, who’s an ATA pilot like Maddie.  The action takes place a little later in the war.  Rose gets lost during a routine ferry flight and ends up in Germany, where she’s taken prisoner and sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück.

It’s harrowing but not twisty—a different kind of story from Code Name Verity, with a less brazen heroine.  Early readers are saying it makes you cry “a different kind of tears”!

MP: Can you tell us anything about your next project?

EW: Well, it’s set in Ethiopia in 1935 during the Italian invasion, and there are planes in it.  Believe it or not, it’s more of a “family” story than anything else.  There are two teen protagonists, a boy and a girl.  I’m in the middle of writing it and don’t want to talk about it too much lest it change drastically before I finish!

MP: Do you have any advice to offer aspiring authors?

EW: “Don’t get it right, get it written!” (—James Thurber.)

Seriously.  An outline helps if you’re struggling.  Write—get something done—get it accomplished.  Then start to polish.

Thanks again for the interview and the chance to wax lyrical about the making of Code Name Verity!

—

Thanks again to Elizabeth for taking the time to answer my questions.

You can find more information about her books on her website.

If you want to read more about Code Name Verity check out my review! (And if you haven’t read it yet, seriously, go pick it up!)

Code Name Verity: A Chick Lit Wednesday Review

“It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.”

Code Name Verity (2012) by Elizabeth Wein (find it on Bookshop) is a strange book in that, I’m not sure what I can actually tell you about it without ruining everything. A plane has crashed in Nazi-occupied France. The passenger and the pilot are best friends. One girl might be able to save herself while the other never really stood a chance. Faced with an impossible situation, one of the girls begins to weave an intricate confession. Some of it might be embellished, some of it might even be false. But in the end all of it is ultimately the truth–both of her mission and a friendship that transcends all obstacles.

Broken into two parts, Code Name Verity is a masterfully written book as, time and time again, Wein takes everything readers know and turns it upside down as another dimension is added to the plot and its intricate narrative.

If a sign of excellent historical fiction is believing all of the details are presented as fact, then the sign of an excellent novel might well be wanting to re-read it immediately to see just how well all of the pieces fit together. Code Name Verity meets both of these criteria.

With wartime England and France as a backdrop, there is always a vague sense of foreboding and danger hanging over these characters. There is death and violence. There is action and danger. And yet there are also genuinely funny moments and instances of love and resistance.

Nothing in Code Name Verity is what it seems upon first reading–sometimes not even upon second reading. This book is undoubtedly a stunning work of historical fiction filled with atmospheric details of everything from airplanes to Scottish landscapes. But what really sets Code Name Verity apart is the dazzling writing and intricate plot that Wein presents. Then, beyond the plotting and the details, there are the two amazing young women at the center of a book that could have been about war or flying or even spies but ultimately became an exceptional book about true friends.

Possible Pairings: Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett,  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, Traitor by Amanda McCrina, Every Hidden Thing by Kenneth Oppel, Tamar by Mal Peet, The Shadow Society by Marie Rutkoski, All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill, Paper Valentine by Brenna Yovanoff, In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

You can also check out my exclusive interview with Elizabeth about this book!