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Jul. 4th, 2023 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI 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 : his expat Russian communist father was arrested in Germany and sent to a camp, after which they fled to Spain where his mother was killed in a bombing, after which he enlisted in the Spanish Civil War and lost his leg when his plane went down, after which he was in the hospital recovering when a wounded German pilot went on a desperate hospital rampage to kill everyone who might have heard the state secrets he'd babbled in his sleep and stabbed him thirteen times with a piece of glass!! AFTER WHICH he was smuggled to France, where he somehow became the French representative in a massive cross-Europe flying race, And Now All This [gestures broadly at events of the book]
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.
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 : his expat Russian communist father was arrested in Germany and sent to a camp, after which they fled to Spain where his mother was killed in a bombing, after which he enlisted in the Spanish Civil War and lost his leg when his plane went down, after which he was in the hospital recovering when a wounded German pilot went on a desperate hospital rampage to kill everyone who might have heard the state secrets he'd babbled in his sleep and stabbed him thirteen times with a piece of glass!! AFTER WHICH he was smuggled to France, where he somehow became the French representative in a massive cross-Europe flying race, And Now All This [gestures broadly at events of the book]
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.
