ELIZABETH WEIN'S "BLACK DOVE, WHITE RAVEN:" A SAD LITTLE BOOK REVIEW

    

     I love Elizabeth Wein.  That's why I drove two hours each way to see her at a book signing last year.  I adored ROSE UNDER FIRE and CODE NAME VERITY.  The second I learned that she had a new historical YA novel (Hyperion, March 2015) coming out, I preordered it.  I've read it now, and I wanted so badly to love it and to write a shamelessly glowing review of it, but I can't.  Wein tells a good story - I don't think she could do otherwise if she tried - but I felt distanced from the characters as if I was seeing them through a screen.  And I think that's because Wein herself is more in love with Ethiopia, where the heart of the book is set, than with either of her two main characters.
     The original Black Dove and White Raven of the tale were, respectively, Delia (African-American) and Rhoda from Blue Rock Farm in Pennsylvania (Caucasian), a pair of Jazz Age, fearless, wing-walking, barnstorming young pilots who traveled around the United States in their little biplane, performing in air shows. 

     Oh, and each of these Wonder Women had a baby: Rhoda's daughter Emilia (Em) was eight months older than Delia's son Teodros (Teo), and the two solo women were essentially co-parents of both children.  Life was wonderful and exciting, but the women chafed against the racism they encountered everywhere they went.  Delia proposed a solution: that the four of them move to Ethiopia, the homeland of Teo's conveniently deceased father, a place to which she's never been but which she imagined to be race-blind.  Rhoda soon comes to embrace this dream too, and they begin diligently saving money to prepare for the move.  But then Delia dies in a terrible airplane encounter with a flock of birds, and Rhoda, now somehow the uncontested guardian of Teo as well as Em (the facts get a little hazy here), retreats to her parents' home where the children are cared for by her family members while she suffers a prolonged and extreme period of depression.
     Meanwhile, while Em and Teo's physical needs are being met, they have no one but each other to turn to for emotional support.  Together they develop a fantasy world in which the two of them are now Black Dove and White Raven, encountering comic-book-style adventures and perils from which they always emerge victorious.  Eventually, Rhoda recovers from her grief to the point where she decides to pursue Delia's dream on her own: she pulls up stakes with the two children and moves to Ethiopia.  But unfortunately, there are a lot of things about her newly-adopted country that Rhoda has yet to learn. 
     It's probably safe to assume that 1930's Ethiopia, a.k.a. Abyssinia,  is not a subject about which most modern readers would have an expertise.  But Wein wants us to know everything about the country as it was at that moment in time - its history, climate, geography, culture, political situation - because she so passionately wants her readers to love the place as much as she does.  And the way she solves this problem is via information dumps.  Over and over, people toss into their conversations the kinds of facts that people never toss into conversations, like that Ethiopia was the only African nation never to have been colonized, or that it had just joined the League of Nations, or that a lot of the guns on the street when Teo and Em first arrived in Ethiopia had been picked up at the Battle of Adwa in 1896.  Wein creates elaborate backstories to explain how her characters have come to be who they are, but to me, the stories were too elaborate, and by and large unnecessary.  After I finished reading the book I went back to the beginning and realized that I had no recollection of most of what I had read there.  I didn't care how Rhoda and Delia first met, or how Rhoda met Em's Italian father, Papa Menotti, or how Delia met Teo's father, or how and when Rhoda and Delia had first learned to fly.  I just wanted to find out what happened to Em and Teo, and none of the backstory mattered to me so I forgot it as soon as I read it.  And I'm an adult, and I'm generally fascinated by history, which to me suggests that a teenage reader with a shorter attention span would forget it all even faster.
     It's easy to see from photographs how mesmerizingly beautiful a place Ethiopia is.

     You can't possibly fault Wein for having fallen in love with it after she'd been there.  Em and Teo have a lot of adventures in Ethiopia, some wonderful, some horrifying.  Often their former imaginary identities as White Raven and Black Dove help them to navigate through the worst real-life catastrophes that befall them.  They make a great team, and their devotion to each other is lovely to read about.  But the real, in-your-face star of this show is Ethiopia itself, not Em and Teo, and I kept finding myself wishing that it were the other way around.

PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH

     Here I am at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York, attending the SCBWI National Conference, which for me involves more direct human interaction over the course of two and a half days than I normally engage in during an entire week.  Which is why today, the busiest day, I've been escaping on-and-off to my hotel room every chance I've gotten, to decompress and snatch a few minutes of alone time.  Like now, for example.  But I also wanted to do a quick post about something that just happened.  At about 3:00 p.m., I was standing at the hotel elevators at the mezzanine level, waiting to ride to the ballroom level to try to get a good seat for Elizabeth Wein's (CODE NAME VERITY; ROSE UNDER FIRE) keynote address at 3:15.  As I waited, a woman in her 60's appeared before the bank of elevators, loudly asking for someone to help her find the right one to get her to the 24th floor.  I wasn't impressed with the woman's imperious tone, or by her apparent expectation that someone else was responsible for finding the correct elevator for her while she stood by, or by her explanation that if she didn't find the correct elevator, her husband would kill her.  Nonetheless, I was semi-inclined to make some sort of effort for her, but before I or anyone else could do anything, who should appear on the scene but Elizabeth Wein (whom I recognized from having met her at a reading), darting in and out of elevators until she found the one the woman needed and then shepherding her onto it.  And then Wein and I and some other people got on a different elevator to proceed to the ballroom level, and then once we arrived, Wein went into the room while everyone else was told to briefly wait outside until the current session had ended.  While I was waiting, a woman using a walker started to try to navigate the heavy doors to the ballroom, so I hurried over to open the door for her, and who happened to be on the other side of that door and to seize it and hold it open for the woman with the walker?  You guessed it.  Elizabeth Wein.
     Eventually, everyone entered the room, and Wein proceeded to speak about responsibility - both the legal kind and the moral kind.  The gist of it was that writers for young people assume grave responsibility because they are conveying information to readers who are at impressionable stages of their lives. 


It was a deeply serious presentation, and I could see attendees around me becoming restless because they were being spoken to for an hour, but not necessarily entertained as much as they would have liked. Wein got  respectful, but not overwhelming applause at the end, and I couldn't help but think that if all the people attending had seen Wein doing what I had seen in the hallways before the presentation, they might have better understood what a privilege it was to hear her preaching exactly what she practices in her own life.

ROSE UNDER FIRE: BOOK REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY CONTEST

     Elizabeth Wein is the author of CODE NAME VERITY, which I've reviewed here on this blog.  As soon as I learned months ago that Wein was following that book up with a not-sequel-exactly, I pre-ordered ROSE UNDER FIRE.  I was mostly through reading it when I wandered onto Wein's website and discovered that she was going to be doing an East Coast book tour and that today she would be at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA.  And since that was her closest stop to where I live, I decided to drive the two hours each way just to be able to see her.  Which I did.

                                        

 

(I'm the doofus on the left with my eyes closed)

 

CODE NAME VERITY

     I've been trying hard this weekend to wrestle my book into submission. It has two things it needs to be ready for fairly soon: submission of the first 15 pages for critiques at the NJSCBWI annual conference at the beginning of June (due April 30th), and submission of the first 5,000 words for the Greenhouse Literary Funny Contest (due at the end of July).  I may well have to submit for the critiques before my first draft is complete, but I truly hope that it will be done before I submit for the contest.
     But when I haven't been writing this weekend, I've been reading, and crying over, Elizabeth Wein's CODE NAME VERITY (Hyperion 2012).  There are so many brilliant plot twists and surprises in this YA novel that I'm afraid to say anything about the story for fear of revealing something I shouldn't.  Loose talk costs lives, as the two heroines are wont to say to each other - tongue-in-cheek, but not.  But I can safely say that the book is set in 1943 in England, Scotland and occupied France, and it follows the paths of two young women and their soul-deep friendship through their various roles in the Allied war effort. Each of them in turn tells her own story for her own reasons, and the reasons may not be as they first appear.  But that's all I feel I can say other than: please put this book high on your reading list. Right now I'm feeling as if I've lived through the War myself over the course of this weekend, and that as grueling as the experience has been, I wouldn't trade it for anything. It isn't often that I read a book and come away feeling honored to have met the characters.