Rose Under Fire: Sequel/Companion to Code Name Verity

Wein_rose under fire

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. Disney, 2013. Age: 14 and up.

Last year, I read one of the best books I’ve ever read: Code Name Verity. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who thought so: it garnered a Printz Honor among other notables.

When a sequel or companion novel comes out for a book I enjoyed as much as Code Name Verity, I almost don’t want to read it. They so seldom compare favorably or they finish the story of the main character(s) in a way I don’t like.

I’m happy to report that Rose Under Fire is every bit as good as Code Name Verity, although the two books are markedly different. Thank you, Ms. Wein, for writing books about real friendship, about real heartache, about real struggles and real history without making them too melodramatic, too saccharine, too cheap.

Rose Under Fire follows a new character (Rose) who happens to know Maddie (one of the main characters in Code Name Verity) during the year following Code Name Verity. Like Maddie and Julie from Code Name Verity, Rose is a pilot based in England during WWII (but she’s an American). Wein does a brilliant job of giving us Code Name Verity fans just enough information about the repeat characters to make us satisfied: their lives continue and continue well. And Wein introduces some wonderful new characters in the title character Rose, another “Rose,” and a few other women (including another woman pilot).

Rose ends up in a concentration camp as a prisoner of war through a flight mistake. There are a lot of things I could say about this time period in the book, but suffice it to say that Wein keeps all the grit, the pathos, the horror of that setting without letting it be too much. This is a YA book for a reason, but it is very well done. The reader gets a sense of the atrocities in a very different way than those presented in well known books for younger readers (such as Number the Stars). In fact, it is the very fact that Rose and her closest companions in the camp are not all Jewish–instead, they are French, Polish, American–prisoners of war and still subjected to the same treatment the Nazis used on the Jews they deemed less than human.

We know Rose escapes because the book is written in journal form–much of it after she escapes from the Nazis and reflects on her time in the camp. We as readers need this emotional distance, and it also makes the story more believable. Rose would never have had paper and pen (and time to write) in the camp, so it wouldn’t have been plausible to have a journal written there.

But Rose is a poet, and she composes some of her most profound poetry in the camp, memorizes it, and writes it down later. She attends the war tribunals in Nuremberg, and she is reunited with some of the key people from her time in the camp. These scenes are almost as heart-breaking as her memories of the camp itself.

All in all, the book is hopeful even though so much is hard to read. A much quieter, more contemplative book than Code Name Verity, Rose Under Fire is well worth reading (and discussing!). Readers of this site are no doubt familiar with The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom; one of the biggest differences between that book and Rose Under Fire is that Rose does not claim to be a Christian. The triumph of the human spirit comes through in this; the two books might make an interesting comparison study. I love what Janie said in her review of Code Name Verity: “It’s a ‘celebration of the human spirit’—ultimately meaningless without Christ, but even unbelievers can sporadically reflect God’s image, and the tragedy of spoiling it.” That is indeed what comes through in this book: all people are made in the image of God and when that image is devalued or spoiled, tragedy results. And yet, in the midst of that tragedy, there is hope.

Highly recommended for older teens (and their parents)

Worldview rating: 4 (out of 5)
Literary merit rating: 5 (out of 5)
Rose Under Fire will be in bookstores in early September. Thanks to the publisher via netgalley for an advance copy; cover image from netgalley.

Stay tuned for more WWII reads for younger readers; next week Janie will review two new ones for middle grades.

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Betsy Farquhar

Betsy is the Managing Editor at Redeemed Reader. When she reads ahead for you, she uses sticky notes instead of book darts and willfully dog ears pages even in library books. Betsy is a fan of George MacDonald, robust book discussions, and the Oxford comma. She lives with her husband and their three children in the beautiful Southeast.

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8 Comments

  1. Pat on August 9, 2013 at 8:29 am

    Going to look for Code Name Verity while I am out today! It sounds like something my 15yo book-devouring daughter would love:-) Guess she will have to wait patiently for Rose Under Fire…

    I SOOOOoooooooooo appreciate your book reviews!!

  2. Anna S. on August 11, 2013 at 7:22 am

    I’ll have to take a look at these books. About the last paragraph: a year or two ago, I read The Hiding Place and a book called Parallel Journeys. One thing that I noted about the two was that although Corrie Ten Boom and the girl in Parallel Journeys went through a lot of the same things, Corrie had a lot more hope because of her faith in God. It was a very interesting contrast.

  3. Pat on August 15, 2013 at 8:31 am

    Just a follow-up… Patti loved the book and is looking to September for Rose!

    • emily on August 15, 2013 at 1:13 pm

      That’s great, Pat! So glad you found Betsy’s recommendations helpful!

  4. Beth@Weavings on September 4, 2013 at 11:18 am

    I am currently reading Code Name Verity right now and I am surprised that you gave this such high ratings. I am having a hard time with the language used and the vulgar terminology used. I understand that she is being tortured, but really is that kind of language necessary for me to “get the picture”?

    I am disappointed that this was suggested especially for teenager, even if they are older.

  5. Steph on September 12, 2013 at 10:01 am

    I read Code Name Verity earlier this year and loved it too! I’m not sure it’s YA (I mean, in today’s market, sure); I thought it was well-written enough and mature enough to just be adult fiction. But anyway! I had the same misgivings about a sequel that you did. A friend of mine who does children’s book reviews also recommended this book last week. I have it on hold at the library for when it arrives.

    And yes, it’s intense…but I watched Schindler’s List when I was 13 or 14 (?) and am not traumatized!

  6. Betsy on September 25, 2013 at 7:12 pm

    I’m sorry, Beth, that you found the language troubling in these books. I personally thought that the language was rather toned down from what it could have been (and, unfortunately, often IS these days in YA lit). I don’t like gratuitous language thrown in to get higher ratings (such as for TV/movies) or to “spice up” typical YA fiction. But in these books, I felt that it was pretty authentic. That is to say, for the average person in a situation of torture, I’m betting the language used won’t be super clean. This author has done a good deal of research–particularly into the concentration camp sections of ROSE–and I appreciated her honesty and her ability to write a hard story without sensationalizing it. I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts on these books.

    And, yes to Steph! I’ve recommended CODE NAME VERITY to several grown-up friends of mine who have enjoyed it every bit as much as I have. I wish there were more YA fiction like this, though, which features characters growing in maturity and truly coming-of-age without wallowing in the usual teen angst. These characters are in their 20s and are kind of what we’d call now “new adult.” But, once you’re in high school, you should be able to read most grown-up literature discerningly. After all, that’s what you read IN high school (Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Woolf, O’Connor, ….).

  7. […] when a book is worth reading, and when it’s not! For example, we thought Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire both worth reading despite their grittiness, but the latest by the same author, The Pearl Thief, […]

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