(no subject)
Aug. 30th, 2020 10:10 amAs we know, Elizabeth Wein's superpower is to look critically at any character archetype and go "What if that, but a WWII pilot?" but as far as I know her latest, White Eagles, is in fact only drawing from an actual factual historical World War II pilot: our heroine Kristina is a fictionalized version of Polish pilot Anna Leska, who escaped Poland by plane when the Nazis took over her airfield and then rejoined the remnants of the army to continue the war in France, then England.
In the White Eagles, Wein gives Kristina a stowaway: Julian, a fierce Jewish eleven-year-old who's determined to convince Kristina to take him all the way to his family in England in her out-of-date plane with a big Polish Army flag on the side of it. Since the plane can only travel about five hours at a time, this journey requires several fuel stops, generally in unfriendly bits of Europe and involving significant obstacles that needs to be overcome by either Julian's cleverness and bravado, Kristina's guts and flying skills, or their developing partnership.
Julian is very much in the Telemakos model -- a brilliant kid with outsized determination and ruthlessness for his age, motivated in large part by personal trauma -- but the prose style of the book, as with Firebrand, her last book in this vein, is definitely aimed significantly younger than the Aksum saga. This is sort of fascinating to me because the actual level of trauma in the content is pretty much equivalent, the way it's written about is just much ... less descriptive and more matter-of-fact? But like. By page 30, the Nazis have taken over Poland and Kristina has seen someone she loves get shot in the head at point-blank range. Later, there's a rape threat that's only thwarted by an eleven-year-old with a gun. It's all in there, just with prose that is, also, suitable for eleven-year-olds or younger. I don't really have an opinion on this, I just think it's an interesting shift.
Both this and Firebird were kindly sent me by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer in the spirit of a traveling book club, so if anybody would like to be their next stop, let me know! I enjoyed both but would be happy to pass them along.
In the White Eagles, Wein gives Kristina a stowaway: Julian, a fierce Jewish eleven-year-old who's determined to convince Kristina to take him all the way to his family in England in her out-of-date plane with a big Polish Army flag on the side of it. Since the plane can only travel about five hours at a time, this journey requires several fuel stops, generally in unfriendly bits of Europe and involving significant obstacles that needs to be overcome by either Julian's cleverness and bravado, Kristina's guts and flying skills, or their developing partnership.
Julian is very much in the Telemakos model -- a brilliant kid with outsized determination and ruthlessness for his age, motivated in large part by personal trauma -- but the prose style of the book, as with Firebrand, her last book in this vein, is definitely aimed significantly younger than the Aksum saga. This is sort of fascinating to me because the actual level of trauma in the content is pretty much equivalent, the way it's written about is just much ... less descriptive and more matter-of-fact? But like. By page 30, the Nazis have taken over Poland and Kristina has seen someone she loves get shot in the head at point-blank range. Later, there's a rape threat that's only thwarted by an eleven-year-old with a gun. It's all in there, just with prose that is, also, suitable for eleven-year-olds or younger. I don't really have an opinion on this, I just think it's an interesting shift.
Both this and Firebird were kindly sent me by
osprey_archer in the spirit of a traveling book club, so if anybody would like to be their next stop, let me know! I enjoyed both but would be happy to pass them along.
