White Rose

Kip Wilson’s White Rose tells the life of anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl, a college student living in Germany during WWII. The fourth born of six children, Scholl grew up in a highly political household. Her father, Robert Scholl, was a political activist and known critic of Hitler. He raised his four children, who are forced into the various sects of the Hitler Youth, to vigorously question the regime. And they do.

Told entirely in verse, Wilson begins Sophie’s story at the end, where she is being questioned about her involvement in a scheme to hand out pamphlets, which are deemed treasonous, exposing Hitler’s atrocities to the students at the University of Munich. From there, Wilson flips between present and past as she unveils the story of how Sophie got to this point. We see her grow up in the girls’ league of the Hitler Youth, urge her boyfriend, Fritz, to not fire any weapons at the front, and yearn for a way out of the mandatory service she must do for a regime that she despises. When she finds out her brother is disseminating pamphlets criticizing Hitler and the Nazi Party, she knows what she must do. Wilson’s book is a timely, important, anthemic tale of political activism and what it means to fight for what is right, no matter the cost.