A Goodreads user asked Elizabeth Wein:

Will other books in the Young Pilots series explore Ellen's sexuality? I was hoping for more mention of that when she was a POV character in The Enigma Game, especially when [redacted] entered the plot. Would love to read another book with a queer main character like The Pearl Thief.

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[Hi there, Julia! I have no doubt I will someday write another book with a queer main character, although it probably won't be Ellen, unfortunately - she is a difficult viewpoint character for me to write because of her Traveller background, to which I am an outsider. I'm also constrained by her age - anything taking place after the events of The Enigma Game makes her too old to be a viewpoint character in a YA novel! But if you're familiar with my books, you'll be aware that I tend not to focus on sexual relationships, and my characters tend to play their cards pretty close to their chests regarding their sexuality. Part of the reason I keep it ambiguous is so that individual readers can draw their own conclusions and relate to the characters on their own terms.

As for Ellen in The Enigma Game, even though she was a POV character, I thought it was inappropriate for her to comment on her previous romantic relationship with Ms Redacted simply because it was so periferal to the plot. It's really Louisa's story - AND I wanted to make the book a standalone, accessible to readers who don't know the characters from my previous books - AND, this is key, in my head I imagine that these three characters are telling their story as a report to some officer (probably you-know-who), but at any rate they'll all be talking together in a room, or writing it out in an official capacity, and Ellen simply WOULDN'T mention what she would perceive to be a potentially dangerous situation off-handedly. Plus - any move she made could have got you-know-who in deep trouble.

A careful reading of The Enigma Game will show that Ellen is not indifferent to her presence: "...that canny, bonny lass, my old friend, was putting on her nightdress in the next room, and I had to pretend I didn't know who she was! It was hard." It's no coincidence that Ellen specifically imagines her taking her clothes off. And again, later, Ellen mourns, "But we couldn't weep in each other's arms as we'd have done in peacetime" - specifically imagining a physical embrace. Don't be fooled by Ellen's public kissing of Jamie - it's not him she holds "so close and tight that the copper and gold hair tangled together at the sides of their heads" (Louisa's observation). Ellen is protecting herself as well as her friend in the very difficult social mores of wartime Britain in the 1940s.

I'm sorry, for the reader's sake, that this context is so between-the-lines, but I put it there very carefully and consciously. A deeper dive into Ellen's sexuality would seem to me to be a red herring in this book, but I did want to try to hint at it for the readers who have met her before.

That's probably more of an answer than you maybe wanted, but I am very much aware how much a certain character means to her admirers, and when a reader feels let down, I feel bound to explain my choices as the author, which aren't always obvious!

Warmly, Elizabeth (hide spoiler)]

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