A murder mystery set in 1937 Europe with intrigue, glamour, secrets, and betrayal. When Stella North is chosen to represent Britain in Europe’s first air race for young people, she knows all too well how high the stakes are. As the only participating female pilot, it’ll be a constant challenge to prove she’s a worthy competitor. But promoting peace in Europe feels empty to Stella when civil war is raging in Spain and the Nazis are gaining power—and when, right from the start, someone resorts to cutthroat sabotage to get ahead of the competition. The world is looking for inspiration in what’s meant to be a friendly sporting event. But each of the racers is hiding a turbulent and violent past, and any one of them might be capable of murder…including Stella herself.
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Content Warnings: Racism, Anti Semitism, Refugee situations, War, Blood, Medical Scenes, Murder, Airplane crash, Loss of a loved one, Nazi Germany
This book is set 2 years before the official start of WW2 and draws from many real life tragedies and issues from the time. It is also quite explicit from the state of Germany at that time alongside Italy and well.. The rest of Europe too.
I read this book for a book club this month, never heard of it before and didn’t go into it expecting too much as historical fiction + mystery generally isn’t my usual genre, and I know less than nothing about aircraft/flying. Nothing would have prepared me for the journey this book was going to take me on.
The year is 1937, the world still reeling after The Great War, facism and communism is spreading across Europe. An air race is set up to promote peace across Europe, with contestants from different countries racing against each other. 17-yr-old British contestant Stella North sets off across the first leg of the race but witnesses a potential murder of another contestant. Who went down? Who was in the attacking plane? Can she trust anyone?
I’ll be honest, a fair few of the characters felt very flat. There was a large cast here, with only 3 being the fully main characters, and a few others being secondary. The rest of the characters were very flat and barely there. Though honestly that didn’t matter too much overall. The main characters were very strong on their own, and the secondary characters added in anything that was missing quite well. All of them worked strongly together and were a joy to read about.
The writing I felt was a bit weak in the first half. The descriptive language was perfect, but repetition was a pretty bad problem. Most of the characters had their bio repeated every single time they were mentioned which did get really annoying - luckily this stops through the second half however. Some of the more powerful scenes were written very well, tension-filled scenes really had suspense in them and were gripping throughout the whole book. The whole second half swept me up so badly I actually forgot to annotate it as I read and ended up reading the entire second half in one go aha
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