about the book
Rose Justice, an American ATA civilian pilot and amateur poet, is ferrying an Allied fighter pilot from France to England when she sees a Nazi missile streaking for her friends. Valiantly she tries to intercept it, but she ends up crashing and being captured by the Germans.
Sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck, Rose is designated a “skilled” worker, and put on an assembly line—making bomb fuses. When she figures this out, Rose refuses to work, and earns two brutal beatings from her guards. After this she is sent into the high-security area of the camp, where she meets the “Rabbits.”
The Rabbits are Polish political prisoners, and the Nazis have medically experimented on them. The Rabbits help Rose remember who she is, and when they find out about Rose’s skill in poetry they insist that her poems be passed around the camp, to give hope to the rest of the women there.
But is there really hope that any of them will survive?
about the author
Elizabeth Wein was born in New York City in 1964. Her father, Norman Wein, worked on the New York City Board of Education, and when Elizabeth was three years old her father was sent to England. There he taught teachers at Manchester Metropolitan University how to teach according to the Head Start program. Meanwhile, Elizabeth learned to be English. A few years later her father was sent to Jamaica to do the same thing, and Elizabeth learned how to be Jamaicanand to speak “patois,” the Jamaican language.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s parents divorced in 1973, and she and her younger siblings moved back to America to live with their mother. In 1978 their mother was killed in a car accident, and the three kids passed into the care of their grandparents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth went to Yale University and studied for a year back in England. She then took seven years to get her PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, going on to hold a Javits Fellowship, too.
Aside from her academic pursuits, Elizabeth also took up English style church bell ringing, called “change ringing.” And of all things, she met her husband Tim at a bell ringer’s dinner-dance! Tim is an Englishman to boot, and so in 1995 they moved back to England—a long sojourn for Elizabeth—and then to Scotland in 2000, where they still live. Together they have their pilot’s licenses and like to fly around whenever and wherever they can.
Source:
Author website
Also by Elizabeth Wein:
Black Dove, White Raven. Disney-Hyperion. 2015.
Code Name Verity. Hyperion Press. 2012.
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