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I forget who it was who was tweeting (rip) about The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, Three Magical Children And Their Holy Dog several years ago, but thank you to whoever it was, because I have had it in the back of my brain all these years and just recently got finally around to reading it.

The format of this one is quite charming -- the narrator is in pursuit of Three Miraculous [Medieval] Children [ahead of the forces of France, which are also, unfortunately, in pursuit of them] and has gone to an inn to Find Out Information about them. Then the various folks at the inn, who have encountered these three kids at a various different times, all take turns chiming in with the bits of the story that they know, Canterbury Tales style, until Then catches up with Now and it's the narrator's turn to do a ride-along with the Miraculous Youths and have his own narrative as a result.

Also charming are the illustrations; almost every page has a variety of illustrations round the borders, with the stated intent being to echo medieval manuscripts where sometimes the pictures are direct representations of the content and sometimes they are just cool doodles. (For example, the book does have a significant dragon, but does not actually contain any two-headed cats.)

The central youths are (respectively) a peasant girl whose village has been worshiping her dead dog as a saint and has just accidentally raised said dog from the dead; a mixed-race monastic acolyte with unrelated super-strength; and a Jewish boy with healing powers whose village has just been burned down in a show of anti-Semitic antagonism. The main plot thread centers around the mass burning of copies of the Talmud by Louis IX (the kids are not fans of the book-burning) (the kids have complicated feelings about Louis IX).

The book operates to a certain degree under medieval-theological rules, in that it takes the existence of some kind of divine as a starting premise for its plot and miracles definitely occur -- at one point a character strongly considers murdering the three possibly-saintly children so that miracles can be performed from their martyred relics, and one gets the sense that this is a dick move but it would probably work. The book is interested in the classic medieval religious debates like 'what is God' and 'is God the same thing as a sense of justice' and 'why does God let bad things happen' but, fortunately, is not at all interested in answering them, just in letting its characters bat them around as they attempt to find a righteous method of surviving in the world. Fun to read! Fun to look at! Definitely recommend finding a physical copy to experience if possible as I don't know how well the illustrations would survive the ebook transition and I definitely don't think they'd make it through to audio.

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I just finished zooming through Elizabeth Wein's new book Stateless, which I read in about a day; it was extremely propulsive!

I feel like Elizabeth Wein these days is sort of a YA Dick Francis, but with planes instead of horses; the plot could be anything but there WILL be some early aircraft in it and we WILL all learn somethings about them. The premise here is that Our Heroine Stella North is the only girl among the various teens from various nations who have been brought together in 1937 (fraught year!) for a big promo-stunt air race promoting Peace In Europe (there isn't and there won't be!); quite early on it's clear that there is some Sabotage and Murder going on but everyone still has to fly their assigned legs and make all their publicity-stunt events while constantly frantically checking their planes and figuring out Who Amongst Them is a killer and whether said killer is operating off their own bat or as part of the broader messy political situation. (Why is Stella the only girl? Honestly I don't know, one of the main organizers in the race is a slightly clueless aviatrix who is THRILLED to support Women in the Air, but Wein has of course written plenty of important relationships between women in her previous books so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt this time.)

The other thing this reminded me quite a lot of is a Hitchcock suspense thriller -- in particular there's a big set piece later in the book where our plucky protagonists are trying to lose the Gestapo in 1937 Berlin, moving through pockets of feverish pre-war gaiety all night so they can get back safely to the airfield in the morning, that more or less played out in my mind as grayscale on 35mm.

Stella is honestly not one of Wein's most vivid protagonists and I didn't really feel that this was a very character-focused book, the cast is pretty much there to tick thematic boxes and ensure that the plot moved along. I think Wein really wanted this book to say something profound about borders and refugees and the tragedy of nationalism -- Stella and her love interest are drawn together by the fact that they're both of Russian expat descent, flying on refugee passports, and not citizens of the nations they are supposedly representing in the race -- and I am not entirely sure that she succeeds in this.

(The love interest also has Inappropriately Floppy Hair and a Brash American Drawl and unfortunately, having just rewatched Titanic last week, that did mean that I spent the whole book imagining Titanic-era Time Traveler Leo DiCaprio and laughing to myself. He also has the most incredible pile-on of dramatic backstory ( which is spoilery )

But! though I don't think this is one of Wein's greats, she did succeed in writing a very solid romantic-suspense thriller and I would love to go back in time and get Hitchcock or Curtiz or somebody to direct it. They'd probably age up the characters but that's fine, this is not the first YA book that would work perfectly well or better if everyone was an adult instead.