A review by wanderlustlover
Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

4.0

I am so very torn on what to rate this one. Part One and Part Three are solid 5's, or at least 4.5's. But Part Two has such a glaring formatting problem that it kept distracting me from being able to be immersed in the book at all. Which was sad to see, since Wein did glorious things with formatting in her first book, and even did 75% of glorious formatting in this one. The formatting just slipped way too hard for the convenience of ramming the main story out too fast in the middle, without it's outter box context and situational placement.

I deeply appreciate the topic of her novels, but I'm not move to deep sensationalism of my points to that because I've read a lot of books on these topics all through my life. I even just finished read/re-reading Maus only a month ago. And I had another piece related to it right before I picked up these books, too. They were very well done for the "I" point of view of one young girl, even when I felt certain parts of it were more convient and neater than history shows it might have been.

There were several moments I got misty eyed, but the only place that I lost my one tear to the book was the first time a certain character cried in Part Three. I love the poetry throughout it. I love the raw emotion. I love the continued listing of the named throughout each section until you have every single girl's name who was etched inside of their minds and hearts left with you when you walked away from the book. Also, the afterward was a great addition to it. Saying what was real and what wasn't, and whose names were the absolute to history ones.