Over the past decade, artists have taken to unpacking the horrific tragedy that fell upon five students and a professor seeking to organize a nonviolent resistance movement against Hitler’s totalitarian regime. In 2006, the German film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, directed by Marc Rothemund, was released, and in 2015, Kirkus Prize finalist Russell Freedman published his children’s book We Will Not Be Silent. And now debut YA author Kip Wilson is publishing her novel, White Rose.

The White Rose was headed by two siblings, Hans and Sophie Scholl, as well as fellow students at the University of Munich. The group gathered behind closed doors to draft leaflets that called for virulent opposition to the Nazi state. The leaflets made their ways through the halls of their alma mater, into the mailboxes of neighboring towns, and into the hands of Nazi officials. What ensued was a witch hunt to find the culprits; the Nazis did end up finding the Scholls.

In American high schools, the White Rose movement is often left off the syllabus, perhaps because before arriving at such resistance movements, teenagers must first learn about the scope of Hitler’s influence and key players, like Anne Frank, who have come to shape our understanding of the Holocaust. “When so few Germans actually resisted the Nazis, and when so many were guilty of indifference, it's easier to lump the entire population together and mark them all as evil, so it's understandable in a way that the White Rose hasn't been so well-known here,” says the author.

 But Wilson has now given both adults and teenagers a new form through which they can begin to understand the White Rose. Wilson takes us through the inner workings of the woman of the group, Sophie, as she considers the implications of resistance, the role women had in a society that killed off so many, and academic and professional ambition amid the turbulence of a totalitarian regime. Structured as a crisscross narrative, the novel offers a simultaneous perspective of the events that led up to the drafting of the first leaflet and Sophie’s eventual death sentence.

If the subject matter isn’t alluring enough, Wilson’s poetry might attract those readers interested in renditions of history in verse. Wilson wrote her dissertation on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke but never tried writing in verse until, as the poetry editor for YARN, she talked to a couple of novelists who write in verse. “They both mentioned that novels in verse are particularly well-suited to tragic, emotional subjects, and that moment was a real epiphany for me,” Wilson says. She began working on White Rose in verse the very next day.

Infused with deep compassion and a meticulous language economy, the poems offer fragmented glimpses into the episodes that populated Sophie’s life, from her initial exclusion from the group because of her gender to the fire in her gut pushing her to join the movement to her final thoughts right before her beheading.

Michael Valinsky is a Los Angeles–based writer whose work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Hyperallergic, among others.