Nazi Germany is a dangerous place for a girl with a stammer – and although her father tries to keep her safe, Ingrid can’t help feeling like she’s let him down. But in the air, soaring high as she pilots her beloved glider planes, Ingrid is free and incredibly talented.

When she gets the chance to fly in a propaganda tour alongside her hero, Germany’s daring female test pilot Hanna Reitsch, Ingrid leaps at the chance. But through Hanna, she will learn some dangerous truths about Germany’s secret missions and the plans that could change the course of the war to secure victory for the Nazi regime. When everything is at stake, Ingrid must decide where her loyalties lie …

I picked up ‘The Last Hawk’ after reading Elizabeth Wein’s excellent Young Adult historical novel, ‘Stateless‘ (2023). ‘The Last Hawk’ is written for a Middle Grade rather than a Young Adult audience, so the story is a little simpler and the book is much shorter (136 pages), but I still found it to be a satisfying read.

I admire how clean and tight Elizabeth Wein’s writing is. She makes every word count. She never reaches beyond her audience’s ability, but she never feels like she’s dumbing things down or making compromises. 

She succeeded in showing me how the world seemed to Ingrid, a seventeen-year-old girl with a passion for flying gliders, who lives her life in anxious silence, afraid that, because she stammers, the Nazi authorities will mark her for death so that she doesn’t pollute the gene pool. 

I liked that Elizabeth Wein kept the story tightly focused on Ingrid and her changing understanding of what her country was asking of her. The parts about flying were joyful. The rest is laden with fear and disappointment. 

I admired how the book slowly built a picture of what it was like to be an ordinary German living under Nazi rule in 1944. Ingrid is seventeen. She was five when the Nazi Party came to power. By 1944, everyone had learned that it was not safe to speak out against the party or even to be seen as anything less than enthusiastically patriotic. 

We see that Nazi policies towards the disabled have already broken Ingrid’s mother’s spirit. That her father has no choice about how to run his school. That even the mayor has lost a son to the party’s eugenics-based ideology. The twelve-year-old boys Ingrid is teaching to glide are all members of the Hitler Youth and are all eager to join the Luftwaffe. These things give the context for Ingrid’s choices. They explain her fear and the limited ability of the people around her to protect her. 

At the heart of the book is the choice Ingrid must make as she discovers more about what her government has done and is planning to do. The context for that choice is set by two adults, a young Luftwaffe pilot whom Ingrid has known since childhood and a female German test pilot, who is seen as a hero of the Third Reich. The first becomes increasingly concerned by what he sees in the course of his reconnaissance work. The second is either very naive or has developed a talent for not seeing the things that would challenge her patriotism. I think the way Ingrid’s choice is described does an excellent job in helping Middle Grade readers walk in Ingrid’s shoes.