Review: The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein

This is the prequel to "Code Name Verity" which I absolutely loved. So when this started bouncing around Booktube I knew I had to read it.



We follow Julia when she is a young girl, she had her 16th birthday part near the end of the book. She returns to the ancestral home of her grand parents, a large estate sold off when her grandfather dies living massive debts behind him. While Julia's family is packing and organizing the last few heirlooms Julia strikes up a friendship with some local Travellers (can they be local when they are Travellers?) and gets herself involved in a murder mystery when a scholar cataloguing her grandfather's archaeological collection comes up missing. Julia is at the very center of the mystery as it slowly unravels dragging almost everyone into its nets.

I really enjoyed this book. It gave me a slight Downton Abbey vibe which I am always down for, and had a real sense of nostalgia with the fading summer days and the unraveling of an old estate. But I fail to see why this needed to be marketed as a prequel to the "Code Name Verity" duology. Yes, we get some back story on Julia, but the time connecting the two stories is missing. So we don't really get to know why and how Julia ended up working for the army. This would have been a great story on its own, but plastering it onto "Code Name Verity" makes it seem like the publishers wanted to ride the wave of success that book has been enjoying.

In the end I gave this book 3,5 stars out of 5.

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