The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“How do you ever hold on to anybody?”- The Pearl Thief, Elizabeth Wein

Before Verity…there was Julie.

When fifteen-year-old Julia Beaufort-Stuart wakes up in the hospital, she knows the lazy summer break she’d imagined won’t be exactly like she anticipated. And once she returns to her grandfather’s estate, a bit banged up but alive, she begins to realize that her injury might not have been an accident. One of her family’s employees is missing, and he disappeared on the very same day she landed in the hospital.

Desperate to figure out what happened, she befriends Euan McEwen, the Scottish Traveller boy who found her when she was injured, and his standoffish sister, Ellen. As Julie grows closer to this family, she experiences some of the prejudices they’ve grown used to firsthand, a stark contrast to her own upbringing, and finds herself exploring thrilling new experiences that have nothing to do with a missing-person investigation.

Her memory of that day returns to her in pieces, and when a body is discovered, her new friends are caught in the crosshairs of long-held biases about Travellers. Julie must get to the bottom of the mystery in order to keep them from being framed for the crime.

       I remember 

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Starting off today with a TS Eliot quote, though the bottom part is Shakespeare (The Tempest, to be exact). It's from The Waste Land, and I think it fits with the whole memory thing and pearls and all that.

I've written before that I like Elizabeth Wein. She's a good beginning historical fiction writer- her historical mysteries are easy to digest and factually accurate. So when I found out that she had a new book coming out, and that said new book would be a prequel to Code Name Verity starring my favorite character from that book Queenie, I was excited. However, The Pearl Thief managed to fall under my (not even that lofty) expectations.

This book reminded me that, while I do like and recommend Wein's books, her writing has always been the reason why the highest I've ever rated one of her books is a 7.5-8. It's very lower level YA/middle grade. I would have no problem giving her books to someone from the ages of 12-15, but for me it just feels too young. This is a matter of taste, of course, and what doesn't work for me may work really well for someone else, but this is my opinion. 

Another thing that didn't really work for me in this particular book is Julie's voice. What I found so charming in Code Name Verity now felt strained and annoying. The all caps and the goddamn italics (Night Film has ruined those for me forever) grated on me. I think maybe I was able to excuse the use of both those in Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire because in those books the main character is writing the story in a journal format. This book, however, is written in a typical narrative style which makes it not as successful. 

I also disliked Wein's sledgehammer approach to showing prejudice against the Scottish Travellers. Maybe it's just me, but I really hate it when morals are forced down my throat in books. Just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There were also a lot of things that just didn't add up to me, like how did Julie's mother and Euan and Ellen's mother play together as children when Julie's mother would have grown up in the Victorian times, a time of stringent class divisions? Hell, even the character of her granddad felt too good to be true. The only time the issue of prejudice was done well was with Mary and her attitude towards the Travellers, but even then that was cleared up way too quickly. 

The characterization was weak in a lot of respects- I felt no real friendship chemistry between any of the characters, but especially between Julie and Ellen. They literally became best friends in, what, half a paragraph? I get that Wein's thing is writing about female friendships, but at this point I think she's exhausted the subject. Maybe I'm in the minority here, likely because I rarely had a best friend as a child, but I find books about friendship boring. Give me a love story over a friendship story any day. Though, I confess, I do like male-female friendships and groups of friends more than female-female friendships. Or hell, I'd even take male-male friendships, because they usually have a better dynamic. Female-female friendships in YA lit often feel oddly pointed, like the author made them friends because of feminism and not because of actual chemistry between the characters. 

I wonder if this book would have been more successful if she used a different main character. Because, frankly, this book adds nothing to the character of Queenie as we knew her in Code Name Verity. In fact, I think I prefer Queenie to Julie, she was tough and smart but she broke down too, and was more tolerable as a whole than this Julie. I mean, sure, their narrative voices are the same, but honestly if you give me a snippet of Rose Under Fire or Maddie's portion of Code Name Verity and ask me to guess who was speaking, I wouldn't be able to tell you. All of her heroines are kind of alike. What I would have liked was if she had created a new main character, maybe one with a similar background who- and here's a thought- maybe when to school with Julie? I know, I know, then Wein can't sell it under the title of Code Name Verity prequel. 

I mean, I thought the idea for the story was interesting, and I did like the peek into both Scotland and the lives of the Travellers, but often I wondered why this book even needed to exist, or exist in the same universe as Code Name Verity. I mean, I'm not saying it's a money grab, because the plot is too fleshed out for it, but I think maybe she pitched it as a standalone and the Powers That Be were like, hey, we could sell this as a Code Name Verity spinoff and sell a lot more books because of it and Wein said yes and decided to insert Julie and her brothers into the roles she had filled prior with different characters.

So do I recommend it? Eh. Maybe. I'd pick up Code Name Verity over this, or especially Rose Under Fire, which is my favorite work of hers to date, but some aspects are quite nice, like the bits about Traveller culture. I'd read this book as a standalone of sorts, not really making any connection between The Pearl Thief and Code Name Verity. Because that is where this book fell the flattest in my eyes.

6 out of 10