lightreads

Cobalt Squadron

2/5. So Elizabeth Wein wrote a Star Wars short YA novel, and Kelly Marie Tran read the audio. I like Elizabeth Wein, I thought, and I like Star Wars, and I like Kelly Marie Tran.

And yet, good grief this is boring. So boring. It’s Rose’s backstory and there’s some sister stuff, but there’s just . . . nothing here? It’s a very sad comedown after the delicacy and complexity and beauty of The Pearl Thief. Kinda of makes me wonder under what ridiculous constraints she had to write it.

It does lean hard into the dogfight esthetic of Star Wars space battles. Like how it’s basically a World War II fight in space; everyone is on manual 100% of the time (why?) and there is an improbable emphasis on seeing other ships with the naked eye. It’s very Elizabeth Wein and it’s very Star Wars, I’d just forgotten how weird it is, having read a lot of scifi that would pearl-clutch at the very idea. But there you go, Star Wars really is fantasy, isn’t it.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can’t talk about this book. Which is a problem, because all I really want to do is shake people violently by the shoulders and shout at them about it.

It’s – okay, bring on the empty useless NY Times review vocabulary – it’s extraordinary. Searing. By which I mean it hurt like hell, and the mark is going to be there for a while. It got me early, somewhere around "I have two weeks. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.” It spit me back out a day and a half later, adrenalized and exhausted, sitting on a train pressed and primped for court and biting hard into my hand to stop myself crying too much.

Okay. Actual useful content. Though like I said, you want to go into this knowing as little as possible. At least one publisher’s summary I’ve seen would be too spoilery, in my opinion. This is a war story set in England and France in the early 1940’s. A women's war story. Only not like that. Crap. Okay. Start over.

It’s about resistance, and breaking resistance, and torture and terror,
,and flying planes at night with no lights and no maps,,,, and doing what you have to do when there are no options left,, and being best friends with the girl who is nothing like you, and guys, seriously, it brings the ladies like the ladies have rarely been brought.

It is an emotional wallop, but it is also subtle, meticulous, beautifully written, and Wein’s afterword puts such a perfect thematic capstone on this sort of fictionalized history. This book told the truth, heh, yes it did.

*hand gestures* Just. Go read it so I can stop being pointlessly vague and I’ll have people to talk to about it.




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spoilers in comments even more than usual.