Instead, the Rose of the title is 18, a civilian volunteer, ferrying a Royal Air Force plane from France to England when she is captured by the Nazis. She was also, by that point, just too old for this story.” “I needed a new character because I wanted to include poems and I couldn’t make be a poet,” Wein says. She tried writing a second novel with the same main character and. She was not yet finished writing it when she realized she was far from done with the subject matter. Many did not live to tell their own stories.Īnd then there’s Wein’s own Code Name Verity, a Printz Honor book and winner of the 2013 Edgar Award. Her fascination with women who were dropped behind enemy lines was stoked by The Women Who Lived for Danger, a collective biography about some of World War II’s female secret agents. She hit upon her main character Rose’s motivation for writing down everything she could remember about having been imprisoned after reading And I Am Afraid of My Dreams by Wanda Póltawska, a Polish survivor of the camps. Wein wanted to know more about Ravensbrück, the notorious women’s concentration camp, after reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. To find the inspiration for Elizabeth Wein’s latest novel, Rose Under Fire (Hyperion, Sept.), one need look no further than the shelves of her bookcase.
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