The Secret of Magic

Rating: 3.75 stars 

Genre: Mystery

Length: 402 pgs

Synopsis: While on a bus traveling through Alabama on his way home from WWII, decorated officer Joe Howard Wilson is ordered, along with the other blacks on the bus, to give up their seats for German POWs. Upset that having fought for the United States in the war hasn't changed attitudes in the American South coupled with disdain for the Nazis he was asked to move for, Wilson refused. The bus continued on its way, but arrived at its destination minus one black soldier. Wilson's body turns up two weeks later.

A few months or a year later (the timeline isn't perfectly clear) a letter shows up at Thurgood Marshall's office with the NAACP. One of the young lawyers, Regina Robichard, is surprised when she recognizes the sender of the letter as the author of one of her favorite books from childhood, The Secret of Magic. The letter urges someone from their office to come down to help with an investigation of Joe Howard's death and Regina convinces Marshall that she should be the one to do it. Thus Regina, a young black woman lawyer from New York City, travels to the Jim Crow South to find a murderer.

Review: There's no magic! Often I'll request books months before their release after seeing them on GoodReads or in BookPage or somewhere and then by the time they come in for me, I've completely forgotten what they were about. That happened in this case. I got this book from the library and it's called The Secret of Magic and there are fairy lights in the trees on the cover, so I assume something fantasy-ish, but instead I got murder. Which is fine - I like murder, but it's a bit like thinking you're going to eat ice cream and then it turns out to be frozen yogurt. Both are good, but my brain wasn't quite ready. So here's your warning: there is no magic in this book.

Other than the whole "no-magic" thing, I actually really enjoyed this book. I loved the character of Regina! She was such an interesting character. Her father had been lynched when she was very young and her mother had turned into kind of a crusader for civil rights, but Regina had never been outside of New York City. When she made her way to a small town in Mississippi, she was completely overwhelmed with the differences between the way the races were treated and how they interacted with each other. She had heard second hand about segregation, but what she didn't expect was how there were black and white people everywhere. In New York City, people of different races stayed in their own neighborhoods and she had never really talked to a white person before. I think my favorite character, however, was Mary Pickett Calhoun. Regina was surprised to get the letter from this famous white author, especially when she reaches Mississippi and find that the lead suspect is the son of a former flame. The murdered man and his father had worked for and Mary Pickett's family for generations, in fact, since before slavery was abolished, so she felt she had to do something to avenge the death, but was also just starting to come to terms with the town's inherent bigotry. All in all, the murder mystery serves as a backdrop to a character study of small town Southern life in the late 1940s and its themes definitely stuck with me after finishing it.

Rose Under Fire

Do you know that feeling when you read a really good book, and then pick up the second book in the series or a different book by the same author and end up disappointed? I was a bit hesitant to pick up Rose Under Fire, Elizabeth Wein's follow-up novel to the wonderful Code Name Verity, afraid of another second book let-down. And Code Name Verity was a hard book to follow up on--the intricate plotting, the sharing of small details, the robust characterization, the chemistry of the friendship, and that one scene (if you've read it, you know what I'm talking about)--but Wein didn't disappoint. Rose Under Fire was a different book than Code Name Verity, telling a wider and arguably darker story by flying us into Ravensbrück, a women's concentration camp in Germany.

Rose Under Fire still shares a lot with Code Name Verity--female pilots, the focus on friendships, and spunky, well-rounded female characters. Rose Under Fire also brings back a major character as a supporting character, bringing a bit more closure to the original story. We're introduced to Rose Justice, a young, American pilot who grew up in Pennsylvania flying planes and going to Girl Scout camp, who crosses the Atlantic to join the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in Britain. There are hints that World War II is drawing to a close, as well as some disturbing rumors about concentration camps and unthinkable medical experimentation coming out of Germany.

Rose finally finagles her way into a flight to France, but disappears on the return trip, forced to land by German fighter pilots and sent away to Ravensbrück. While in Ravensbrück, Rose is adopt by a group of Rabbits, Polish women and girls who survived horrific, inhumane medical experimentation at the hands of the Nazis, who form a small family group in order to survive. Like Code Name Verity, Rose Under Fire is written as a collection of journal entries, a few letters from a friend, poetry, and a magazine article. Most of Rose's experience in Ravensbrück is shared in retrospect by a Rose who has just escaped the camp, unable to function in her newfound freedom and trying to make some sense out of what happened to her.

I didn't need to worry--Rose Under Fire surpassed my expectations. As I stated earlier, the story told was wider. The first book was the story of a friendship between Maddie and Julie. There is no defining relationship in Rose Under Fire, but rather many friendships that helped these women survive horrific circumstances. Rose Under Fire has more characters, but all of them remain well-rounded, real people. Instead of the emotional shock of Code Name Verity, Rose Under Fire was in some ways a quieter, but more horrifying book that is trying to witness and recognize the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet, despite its dark subject matter, it leaves readers with a sense of hope. Rose remains a charming, honest, sympathetic narrator who manages to share a horrible story while pointing out the places where humanity survives--a poem, a shared piece of bread, hiding a friend, moments of humor, or a secretly embroidered handkerchief.Rose Under Fire works well as a follow-up/semi-sequel, but it would be equally as good as a stand-alone book. It's not an easy book to read, but I highly recommend it!

4.5 stars

I received an ARC of Rose Under Fire through NetGalley. Rose Under Fire was published June 3, 2013 in the UK and will be released on September 10, 2013.