Rose Under Fire

This isn't nearly as heart wrenching as Code Name Verity, but I did cry a few times. I feel like I need to reread both books to get how inter-woven they are. (I didn't even remember one character in this from CNV until I read one of the reviews here and it made me go “Oh! Right!”.) Elizabeth Wein really knows how to tell a story.

After Code Name Verity's deftly plotted tale, I expected more from Elizabeth Wein. The tale of a young American woman who gets a job piloting for Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary and ends up captured by the Nazis, enjoying thier hospitality at Ravensbruck, comes across as preachy and nothing more than a vehicle for the retelling of Nazi atrocities.

A very powerful book. 4.5 stars rounded up.
The main characters are fictional, but most of the places and events depicted are/were real.
A good part of the book is set in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. It was a terrible place. Roughly 150,000 women passed through it. Some survived. You could always depend on the Nazis to be even more horrible than most can imagine.