Review: "Stateless" by Elizabeth Wein

 

Stateless by Elizabeth Wein
Published March 2023 via Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
★★★★

Good grief but Wein writes a gripping book. Stateless is set in Europe, on the eve of World War II; war is not—quite—yet a whisper of word in Stella's consciousness. Raised in the shadow of loss, what she really loves is flying, and now she has the chance of a lifetime: a friendly competition, in the name of promoting peace, between a dozen young pilots. They'll race in stages across Europe, culminating in a life-changing prize for one of them and good press for all the countries involved.

That's all good and well...until Stella witnesses one pilot force another out of the sky, and suddenly a friendly race becomes something else entirely.

This is the first of Wein's books that I've read that focuses more on mystery than on war—war is a huge factor in this one (see: eve of WWII; also the Spanish Civil War as a significant factor in some characters' stories), but it's not the primary story. Stella has a limited number of suspects, which rapidly narrows (the villain becomes clear midway through the book, and the focus shifts from whodunnit to survival and outwitting), and, as with so many of Wein's books, there's a wonderful emphasis on friendship and working together.

I'm fascinated by the inclusion of Nansen passports, which I'd never heard of before. They sent me on a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole—they're a former solution to a problem that still exists today. I won't go into too much detail for what they mean for this particular bit (although I will say that passports, in general, matter in Stateless), but I love getting those little details—learning something else about a particular point in history.

Time to do a reread of some of Wein's books, I think—I can very nearly quote from Code Name Verity and The Pearl Thief, but it's been long enough since I read Black Dove, White Raven that it'll practically be a brand-new Wein book full of surprises.