Punkettes | January 7, 2013
I hope everyone has had an awesome holiday season – I know I have.
But back to book reviews. There seems to be a dearth of actual Dieselpunk titles – we certainly haven’t been offered any review copies anyway, so I offer you some peripherally related material. I’ve read some stuff that would definitely be of interest to a Dieselpunk audience. This one is a YA historical fiction novel set in WWII.
I picked this one up because a fellow reviewer raved about it. She said she didn’t want to say too much about it because it would be so easy to give things away, since the story involved an unreliable narrator. But she had rated it as highly as she ever rated a book, and then I saw there was an airplane on the cover. I’m interested in WWII, as any proper Dieselpunk would be, and I love flying and think airplanes are the coolest thing in the world.
Well, Anna was right about not wanting to say too much about the plot. It begins with Julie, an agent of the French resistance, who’s been captured by the Gestapo in a fictional town in France. She’s been tortured, and writes that she’s been given paper to write her confession on. It’s eerie to read it, because she addresses the reader as if you’re the Gestapo officers torturing her.
It’s clear that she’s stalling, starting her story from her childhood, rather than getting to the point, and you have to keep in mind that she’s writing this for the Gestapo, and however many times she swears she’s telling the truth, it’s hard to tell how much she might be holding back. She tells the story of her friend Maddie, who flies planes for the Air Transport Auxilliary, and how Maddie came to be a pilot. I was captivated by the airplane parts
But then… well, I won’t say too much more, but the author has apologized (“ewein” in the comments) for making me cry on the bus, over on my personal website. Never had a book hit me so hard, so beautifully. Apparently it’s rated somewhere as one of the top 5 books that will make you cry. I’ve choked up on a scene before, but not like this.
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Category: The Punkettes |
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Tags: Air Transport Auxilliary, France, WWII, YA
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