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2.5 stars

I'm the kind of person who avoids reading books about WW2 (or about wars that happened in reality in general) whether nonfiction or fiction because I try to avoid reading about the horrible things that humans can do for greed and power but I decided to give this a try since it was a graphic novel and about freedom fighters.

Honestly, I was disappointed with the execution because I thought it would have been more story detailed but we only get snippets of key events rather than a retelling. We were just shown the members meeting a few times with minimal talking beyond reading the German literature that they would include in the flyers and not much about what they have done to execute the plans beyond buying stamps and mentions (not actions except for the one in the university) of throwing the flyers everywhere.

Moreover, the whole graphic novel just left me confused beyond the meaning of their message since the speech bubbles made it hard to know who's speaking and most of the times, two different topics are mentioned and are often contradictory. I wasn't a fan of the blurry/air brush like artstyle, though that's personal preference more than anything.

Overall, in my opinion, this book was more confusing than anything to me and could have been executed in a better way. I like my retellings to show me a linear story (or at least somewhat of the sort) since this book just shows events abruptly after the other with few ones that weren't really important.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with the digital copy for an honest review.

A topic that needs a graphic novel about it, but this one fell a bit short in my opinion. Disjointed and hard to read. Hopefully there are still time for edits before publication.

Freiheit is a fascinating story that one doesn't often see in this format. Through unique art and masterful story telling, Ciponte shows us a new side of WWII. Though I enjoyed the book, I found it to be hard to follow at times. If you're a lover of the style and formatting of old school comics and interested in history, this graphic novel is for you.

Freheit!: The White Rose Graphic Novel by Andrea Grosso Ciponte
Thanks to Plough Publishing and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this graphic novel.
Based on the actual White Rose group that spread leaflets against Nazi rule and actions during World War II. Several members were arrested and quite a few of them were executed by use of a guillotine. I didn’t realize that anyone in that era was executed by any means other than shooting. A highly impactful graphic novel that sums up the growth and activities of The White Rose and also includes the real writings on the original leaflets. Amazing strength, integrity and bravery sums up The White Rose members! A must for history buffs, 5 stars!
* I received an advance reader copy of this book for volunteer review consideration and all opinions and thoughts are my own.

Graphically an interesting take on the story of Die weiße Rose, but the telling of the story was rather disjointed, and erratic and not in a good way.
The story is told in snippets, and jumps and is probably hard to follow if you are not familiar with the Scholl´s story.
Visually, it had some very impactful pages, p77 had a very good, Escher-esque illustration, and is a personal favourite. Also, the use of darkness and light was visually very interesting.
So, 4 stars for the art, minus 1 for storytelling.

Such a powerful graphic novel from Ploughshares, and important book to put into the hands of readers. The story is stirring and the art adds to the intensity of the book.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for a free digital review copy. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I was interested in picking up a historical graphic novel and this caught my attention. This graphic novel focuses on the White Rose, a group of university students who resisted the Nazis. While I did appreciate the unique muted artwork to capture the atmosphere, the illustrations were confusing to follow. I felt like it was missing essential storytelling elements to keep the reader engaged as well. It was heavy with factual text as if I was attending a history lesson and I didn't connect too much with the students as much as I wanted to. If anything, I wanted to learn more about their personal lives before forming the group.

I wasn’t sold on this one for about the first third. I found the text too heavy and the artistry too muted for a graphic novel. However, I should have had more faith in the author because I was drawn in covertly, without even knowing it myself. Suddenly, I was gripped by the intensity of the situations and the incredible strength of this group of young people. The ending was certainly not unexpected, but it still struck me violently. As it should have.

Thank you to Andrea Grosso Ciponte, Plough Publishing, and NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beautifully drawn and colored graphic novel. It was an emotional trip. I felt pride and sadness. I am so glad to see this story get told.

That's one big no from me. Not because of the theme of the book, but because of that writing and art. Some of those pictures will bring me nightmares, I am sure of it. I couldn't understand, why sometimes faces/bodies are drawn, sometimes they looked awful, somehow changed photos. Just ugliness.

I greatly admire the Scholl siblings and their friends, and was intrigued to see that there is an upcoming graphic novel about them. I enjoyed reading it, and appreciated the accurate likenesses and atmospheric, grainy art style. However, the story jumps around in a way that may confuse someone who is new to this story, and because the author leaves out several significant details and key points of context, readers who are already knowledgeable about and invested in the White Rose Movement's history may find aspects of this book disappointing.

I hope that this book will make people more aware of these historical events and inspire them to read some of the sources from that time. This book includes the text of the White Rose leaflets in both German and English at the end, but for greater context, I would encourage people to check out "At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl" and secondary source titles.

There are many books on the resistance to the nazis, and The White Rose movement was probably important, but the way this was laid out and written, this has got to be the most boring version of resistance I have ever read.

It is very text heavy, and with little context it is hard to have sympathy with the main characters and how they feel. They discuss writings and philosophy, and write pamphlets to get the people to rise up. Surely there could have been a better story here, since the story was based on real people and real lives.

Still, I'm sure it could be a good starting point for those interested in the movement, but for me, it was just hard to read. Good art though.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

This felt like the Cliff Notes version of an actual story. There were no elements of a story. The was no real pacing, it was kind of haphazard and jumped around more than a kangaroo on coke. The characters had nothing memorable about them. They worked against the Nazis. Cool. Thats awesome. But thats literally all we know about them. We never get to know them at all so when they're killed (not a spoiler, it says it in the description) i didn't feel a thing.

This was a really bad graphic novel and I feel like the people who wrote this got bored halfway through and just phoned in the rest. This story deserves a book or a movie. Not some half assed graphic novel.

This is a beautifully drawn graphic novel. Simplistic in color, and design, but effective to tell the story of a group of German resisters during WWII. The written story however, felt like it was missing quite a bit of detail. With so many characters involved it would have been nice to flesh them out some more. I would have also liked more detail on the White Rose leaflets within the graphic novel, namely what they were, how the group came up with the decision to make them, and the reaction to them. A longer, more detailed story would have greatly benefited this work overall. The most impactful part of the whole novel was the inclusion of the text of all White Rose leaflets at the end of the story. Reading them in their entirety really gives a sense of what a severe risk these individuals were taking, and the call to action they were nearly begging the German population to undertake. This addition greatly elevated my feeling of understanding of the story being told. Their inclusion led me give the book 3 stars instead of 2. After reading the leaflets I now want to learn even more about the White Rose.

This is a great book for anyone wanting to know about the White Rose. My only criticism is that the art style leaves a lot to be desired, but I understand why they went with a watercolor art style. It's just not for me.

A rather dull version of a story I think should have showed more emotion and vigor. The grainy appearance takes you back, but overall, little more than a drawn-out history lesson

Historical Graphic Novels have become a guilty pleasure. It is such an interesting way to consume history and pieces like this are so poignant in doing so the art allows for such a more intriguing story to be told.

This is a story I hadn't heard of before and found myself intrigued by, and I found myself immersed whole heartedly in this story of resistance and perseverance.

The last page left goosebumps on my arms.

I was really keen to read this and learn more about the White Rose but don't feel I've really gained much. It's less the story of the group and really more like a series of excerpts from another, more detailed graphic novel. I just felt that it was lacking both in the actual storytelling aspect and the information. I also found some of the illustrations to be difficult to follow as it wasn't always clear who the characters were. From my limited knowledge, I know that what the members of the White Rose set out to do, is something that should be more widely known, but I'm not sure that this is the book for the job.

[review originally posted to GoodReads; please view there for best formatting. in addition, please make non-drm-locked pdfs available; for someone without an e-reader it is extremely slow to use adobe digital editions as it lags severely to the point that flipping pages takes a minute each.]


Obligatory "I am Jewish" note. A lot of reviewers of books on the Holocaust are not Jewish. Please consider people's backgrounds and proximity to this content when reading reviews.

(Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.)

Alright, let's talk about this. I'm not only Jewish but have consistently gone to Jewish schools, so I have been through "the Holocaust unit" several times, with several types of media, and, yes, I have done my fair share of research on the White Rose. I watched the Sophie Scholl film in middle school and in high school I wrote a paper on Hans Scholl that required some digging. This is not to say I am an expert; I do have some knowledge and specifically some research knowledge.

In my opinion, if you are going to write a book on the Holocaust, you have got to be absolutely sure of what you are doing. There has been enough damage done with misinformation, and the presses are only too happy for trauma porn. Fortunately, this book avoids that very deep pitfall, but aspects of it make me feel that the author could have put more time and effort into telling this story, which really does deserve better coverage. As everyone probably knows by now, I love nonfiction graphic novels, and I find them a great way of spreading necessary information.

One of my primary issues with the book is that it seems to not balance these elements-- nonfiction, entertainment-- very well. The book is an anthology of moments from the White Rose members at this time, and so rather than telling a really cohesive story where you get a sense for everyone's lives, it all feels a little disconnected. This makes it somewhat ineffective at conveying an entertaining narrative. The excerpts from different texts, including the White Rose leaflets, are a good idea but not integrated well enough to be interesting.

At the same time, the lack of attention to details means that you won't learn much more here than you would on Wikipedia. Many important events in the lives of the members of the White Rose are glossed over, including the starting of the organization, and what is left is quite disorganized, so that you can't really put together what's going on and whether this bit is real or just an invention to get to the next plot point.

Here come some very specific critiques.

Firstly, of course we have one of those "look at the nice white gentile man helping the sickly little Jew" moments. There's a whole scene where Hans stops and gives a loaf of bread and a flower to a... well, a sickly little Jew. I mean, look at this.





This reads very poorly. I Googled for whether this was at all true and could find nothing, though I'm willing to admit this might be buried in some research text in another language (we'll see why I don't think that momentarily.) What makes this even more frustrating is that it is based in the truth that Hans was sent to the Eastern Front and was horrified by what he saw there. There are lots of ways to portray this-- you could, for example, have him sent off and then return too horrified to discuss what he saw. Or you could have him talk about it! Frankly, I am sick of shock-value shots of dying Jews.

Speaking of which, I do not like the trend of "guy runs into some Jews just sitting around" in Holocaust media. It's here, it's in Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it's probably in a lot of other things I can't think of off the top of my head. People in concentration camps, in case this needed to be said, didn't sit around doing nothing. I'll link two sources here that could easily have been read by the author: (1) (2) I just don't get it. It's possible, sure, that Hans just happened on some Jewish people lying against a fence, given that they occasionally had brief moments of 'free time', but it's so unlikely, and on top of that the scene is clearly there to paint Hans as a hero to these Poor Sickly Jews. Which turns said Poor Sickly Jews into props for Hans's hero moment. This is pretty obviously antisemitic.

In addition to this, the book omits one very important piece of information: Hans Scholl was gay. He stopped supporting the Nazi party after being arrested for being gay, and his siblings joined him. It's the sort of thing that seems fairly relevant to a history of the White Rose, and though it's not immediately apparent knowledge, again, with some small amount of research one could find this out. If you read more modern articles or books, you'd see discussion of this, particularly because once researchers found the original trial materials it was obvious. This is what I wrote a paper in high school on! It couldn't have been hard to find material on it if some random high schooler did a better job.

So I had to knock stars off the book. I almost knocked all of them off, because if you're not researching or making your book entertaining, really, what are you doing? What's the point? Why are you writing, let alone about the Holocaust?

What convinced me to add a single star back on was the art. It is genuinely very nice art. And I like the idea of a graphic novel with this art. The style is beautiful and unique, and if I was judging only based on that we'd have a full five stars here.

But graphic novels are not just art. Nonfiction graphic novels in particular are very complex, and there just isn't much to convince me that it was worth making this one when it lacks the most important elements-- research, entertainment, and story. And it doesn't even manage to avoid antisemitism! So, well, there you are. Two stars. Go watch the Sophie Scholl film or, yes, read the Wikipedia page. I don't think this book is any better.