Tag: WWII

LisaAnnReads > WWII
Review: Dear Mrs. Bird by A.J. Pearce

Review: Dear Mrs. Bird by A.J. Pearce

Posted on by lisaannreads

Sorry for being missing in book-action the last few weeks, friends. I naively thought that when my boss was out of town for three weeks and I was in charge of the 22 people she usually supervises that I’d still have time for book-reviewing. That was not the case. But Beth is back and I’m only in charge of my nine again so let’s celebrate with a book review, shall we?

I received a digital ARC of Dear Mrs. Bird from Scribner on NetGalley. I’m grateful to Scribner for their generosity and am happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis
Emmy Lake, is a small-town girl living in Blitz-sieged London who dreams of being a real journalist. For now, she’s got a respectable job at a law firm, an apartment with her best friend, and her volunteer work answering emergency calls for the Auxiliary Fire Service. She stumbles upon an advertisement for a job in the London Chronicle and promptly applies, visions of her life as a Lady War Correspondent traipsing through her daydreams. Except, the job isn’t with the London Chronicle, it’s with a failing women’s magazine, as a typist for Mrs. Henrietta Bird, an advice columnist who refuses to print answers to anything unpleasant. Emmy bucks up and settles in to her new role, only to find herself dismayed at Mrs. Bird’s refusal to respond to readers with real needs. So Emmy starts to write back. Both expected and unexpected mayhem ensue.

Tone & Writing
Dear Mrs. Bird was, for a book about World War II in which some truly awful things happen, surprisingly cheery in tone. It is rare to find a book about World War II that manages to keep a light tone while writing in an appropriate manner about grave topics. The writing here is charming but never flippant. It’s popular fiction but still flowed and wasn’t jarring like Lilac Girls was for me.

It’s clear Pearce did her research on women’s magazines and WWII-era slang—indeed, it was the slang that by golly nearly put me over the top at first. It felt a little forced initially and contributed to Emmy seeming a bit too wide-eyed but that feeling dissipated after the first few chapters and I settled in to the language choices. Overall, the book is earnest and hopeful in a way that was reminiscent of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call them a read-alike but I do think someone who enjoys one will enjoy the other.

Emmy
Admittedly, I was a bit taken aback at how light Dear Mrs. Bird started off—Emmy wasn’t clicking with me in the first few chapters and a frivolous female lead in a book about World War II was the last thing I wanted to read. After a few chapters I got used to her and what seemed frivolous about Emmy revealed itself to be an almost-indefatigable optimism combined with a heightened sense of right and wrong. Men and women on the home-fronts of World War II were told to buck up and put on a good face—Emmy is what it looks like when a character takes that encouragement to heart, even as bombs literally fall around her. As the plot progressed, the book took surprisingly poignant turns that made me care deeply about her by the end.

There wasn’t much that I saw in Emmy that I really identified with—even when I’m trying to put on a good face, I can’t be that cheerful or earnest and I can’t see myself making some of the choices she made. With that said, she endeared herself to me and I started wanting the best for her. Though I don’t think Dear Mrs. Bird will become as iconic as Anne of Green Gables, in some ways Emmy reminded me of Anne in her optimism and wanting the best for those around her. Both are clearly intelligent and yet do some frightfully silly things in their quests to do the right thing. If you’re a reader who identifies with Anne (I used to think I was and have sadly had to accept that I’m far too cynical to be Anne. I’m probably Marilla. But I digress)…if you’re a reader who identifies with Anne, you will probably be able to settle in to Dear Mrs. Bird faster than I did because you may identify more quickly with Emmy. If you’re not an Emmy-Anne, Dear Mrs. Bird is still a delightful book. Anne won over Marilla and Emmy won me over.

Recommended
If All the Light We Cannot See is on one end of the WWII literature spectrum and The Nightengale somewhere in the middle, Dear Mrs. Bird is the opposite end from All The Light. The writing is light and the ending unambiguous and not soul-crushingly depressing. I recommend it for readers who enjoy more popular fiction or loved Guernsey.

Notes
Published: July 3, 2018 by Scribner (@scribnerbooks)
Author: A.J. Pearce (@ajpearcewrites)
Date read: July 1, 2018
Rating: 3 ½ stars

Review: The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe

Review: The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe

Posted on by lisaannreads

“They had a plan, but we’ve carried out our own plan. They wanted the children to be abandoned like junk in a warehouse, but we opened a school. They wanted them to be like cattle in a stable, but we’ve made them feel like people.”

“And what use has that been? All the children in the September transport have died.”
“It was worth it. Nothing has been in vain. Do you remember how they used to laugh?….”
“But it lasted such a short time—“
“Life, any life is very short. But if you’ve managed to be happy for at least an instant, it will have been worth living.”
“An instant! How short is that?”
“Very short. It’s enough to be happy for as long as it takes a match to be lit and go out.”
 

Synopsis
The Librarian of Auschwitz is a fictionalized account of Dita Kraus, a real-life teenager who survived the family camp in Auschwitz. While in the camp, she risked her life as the “Librarian,” managing the eight books that had been smuggled into the camp and used in the school as well as the “living books”—people who knew certain stories so well that they could be called upon to recite them as if they were reading the tale. Being caught with the books was sufficient cause to be shot on sight, and yet Dita and others risked their lives to keep these books and educate the children of Auschwitz.

“YA”
While The Librarian of Auschwitz is written on the reading level of a YA book with teenagers as the majority of the main characters, it is still highly readable as an adult reader. This isn’t a bubbly, romance-y YA. Though different stylistically, The Librarian of Auschwitz reminded me of The Book Thief—another well-written book that takes the Holocaust and its death and vicious ideologies and presents them in age-appropriate, though unsanitized ways. By its very subject matter, this book is brutal—but brutal in ways that are appropriate for older middle school through high school readers. The language and events are not dumbed down—it is clear what is happening and there were many times I teared up and had to take a minute—including when an arriving solider stood to finally announce that Bergen-Belsen, the camp Dita had been transferred to, was liberated in the name of Great Britain and her Allies.

Historical Fiction
Historical fiction set during WWII in the European theater, when done well, is one of my favorite genres. I adore All the Light We Cannot See (even if that makes me cliché) and last year inhaled Konar’s Mischling. When a few friends started posting on Instagram about Librarian of Auschwitz, I knew I had to read it.

Several of the characters featured in The Librarian of Auschwitz were real or were closely based upon real people. It names and tells the stories of many of the ordinary, extraordinary people who lost their lives in Auschwitz.  I had never heard of Fredy Hirsch, the almost forgotten almost-hero of the family camp. I was not very aware of the Resistance operating within the camps, the almost uprisings. Fredy was simultaneously the light of the family camp school and an ordinary man. He could easily have been your kid’s soccer coach or the guy who leads bootcamp at my gym. And he was killed at roughly the same age I am now.

#NeverForget and White Nationalism
Holocaust Remembrance Day was a few weeks ago, with the usual posts of #NeverForget. And yet, it feels as if we have forgotten.  It feels as if the farther we get away from the events of the 1930s and ‘40s, the easier it is to see the Holocaust as another fact to be memorized in history class. Currently there is a bill pending in Poland to ban referring to Auschwitz and other death and concentration camps in Poland as “Polish camps.” We distance ourselves and we forget. The Nazi machine ran because ordinary people were willing to serve as the nuts and bolts, the cogs that ran the machine. We tell ourselves it wouldn’t have been us, yet we are no different than the majority of Europeans—or even Americans—who willfully ignored or refused to believe what was happening. Or knew it was happening and were complicit in their silence. Feel free to disagree if you want, but the torches of Charlottesville tell me I’m right.

The sheer number of lives lost is so huge as to feel not real at times. And lost in these numbers is often the horrific way over six million people lost their lives to the racist machine that was Nazi Germany and its collaborators. We remember the number who died but not how, or even why. With the Holocaust fading in collective memory, with its events becoming less known and thus less shocking, the scourge of white nationalism is again making public its face.

Books like The Librarian of Auschwitz are vital tools in the moral battle in which we now find ourselves, knowingly or not. Dita Kraus was a real child—a child—who was taken from her home, herded into a train car, starved, tortured, beaten, and nearly killed (and not for lack of trying on the part of the Nazis). It is important that we see that behind these astronomical numbers and the vicious and morally wrong ideologies there are people—children—whose lives were and are again being threatened.

I put The Librarian of Auschwitz in the same category as Refugee. If we are to raise a kinder, more just generation immediately after ours, we must have books like this. We must read them, we must share them, and we must ensure they are taught.

Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants, and oppressors, whatever their ideology—whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate, or martial law—have had one thing in common: the vicious persecution of the written word. Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.

Recommended
It’s easy to avoid books set in the Holocaust as “too depressing.” To an extent, all books set in the death camps are bleak, or at least they are if they are accurately written. And yet, as much as any book set in the time can be, The Librarian of Auschwitz is hopeful. Just as the books served as a bright spot in the lives of the children, so too is this book a bright spot within Holocaust literature. It is a book of resistance and love, match sparks amidst the darkness of the camps. Even if you find this time period difficult to read about, I recommend The Librarian of Auschwitz. The YA reading level make it a bit easier to read than some others and it is vitally important, more than ever, that we read stories of what happens when we allow racist ideologies to take hold—it starts on the fringe and then you look up and realize the entire cloth has unraveled, the fringe become the mainstream. We still have time.

Notes
Published: October 10, 2017 by Henry Holt & Company (@henryholtbooks)
Author: Antonio Iturbe, Translator: Lilit Thwaites
Date read: January 28, 2018
Rating: 4 ¾ stars

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Review: The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

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“Lili,” Eve asked impulsively. “Are you ever afraid?” Lili turned, rain dripping off the edge of her umbrella in a silver curtain between her and Eve. “Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.” She slid her hand through Eve’s elbow. “Welcome to the Alice Network.”

Synopsis
Loosely based on the true story of a female-run spy network during World War I in France, The Alice Network follows Eve, a young spy working in the network, and Charlie, a woman searching for her beloved cousin shortly after the Second World War. The book flashes back and forth between Eve as a young woman in the network and Eve as an older, broken woman helping Charlie on her quest. Adding to the drama, Charlie is not the upper-class socialite her family tries to force her to be and is running from her own demons. Raising questions of what it means to serve and to save, The Alice Network is a compelling story about the largely overlooked contribution of a daring group of women during the Great War.

The Power of Solidarity of Women
The Alice Network is, above all else, a story of the power and bravery of women. The actual Alice Network run by Louise de Bettignies (“Alice Dubois”) is credited with saving the lives of more than a thousand British soldiers during the nine months of the height of its operation. She even obtained advance information on the German attack on Verdun, but the military officials in charge refused to believe the information. Verdun was ultimately the longest lasting and one of the most costly battles during World War I.

One of my favorite quotes from the book is a quote from Louise de Bettignies taken from a primary source written by someone familiar with those in the network.

“Bah.” Lili gave a wave of her hand, a hand so thin it was nearly transparent in the sunlight. “I know I’ll be caught one day, but who cares? I shall at least have served. So let’s hurry, and do great things while there is yet time.”

While The Alice Network is a work of fiction and Quinn admits she took quite a bit of license with the story, I wish there were more books like this. I wish any of the history classes I took in high school or college had bothered to include the contributions of women like these.

Characters
In the flashbacks, Quinn makes you care for Eve and Lilli/Louise/Alice deeply. The book stays true to the end result of the network and the woman who ran it, with these pages being some of the most emotionally wrenching of any book I’ve read recently. (This is not a book to be read in public as you draw closer to the end—the notes I kept while I read say “Damn you Kate Quinn for making me cry in a Starbucks.) I tried to find more on Louise de Bettignies after I finished The Alice Network but there seems to be very little out there. This is not terribly surprising but is frustrating and makes books like The Alice Network all the more relevant.

During the alternating scenes with Charlie, Eve is older and broken. She survived the war physically but little is left of her spirit—as the journey to find what happened to Charlie’s cousin Rose unfolds, so does Eve’s story, so that the flashbacks are presented as Eve telling Charlie and Finn (Eve’s handsome Scottish handyman….you can guess where that’s going to go) what happened to her. The deeper the trio travels into France, the deeper the reader gets into Eve’s story and the closer the reader gets to the traumatic events that led her to be the woman she is today. I occasionally found Charlie annoying, though I started to see her more as the vehicle through which the reader saw and learned more about Eve. With the book structured as it was, you get both Eve’s interpretation and story of what happened to her as well as an outsider’s view of who the woman Eve is now. The back-and-forth telling helped make Eve a more well-rounded character and gave you a “hook” to want to know how Eve of WWI became this broken Eve after WWII.

There was a clear villain (besides generally the Germans) and Quinn was masterful at making him so evil he was almost serpentine. My skin would crawl when he was on the scene and my heart would cheer each time Eve outwitted him or used him in the spy ring.

The Spies
As to the three spies you meet in the book, The Alice Network simultaneously emphasized both the amazing cunning and skills of the spies like Lili/Louise/Alice and Eve as well as their ordinary-ness. Besides learning multiple languages at early ages, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about the lives these women led prior to being called up to service in the Network. Fictional Eve was a secretary, a square peg in a round hole, wanting to serve her country more directly than was typically allowed for women during the First World War. Louise was a poor aristocrat from a family with nothing left but its titles. And yet, women like these did something extraordinary, risked their lives in the service of others.

War Novels
By setting The Alice Network when she did, Quinn wrote both a World War I novel (Eve’s chapters) and a World War II novel (Charlie’s chapters). While I haven’t reviewed many on the blog, I am a big fan of a well-done World War II novel. I adore The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See and have read many of the other significant WWII novels published recently. (Knowing what a well-done WWII novel reads like is one of the things that made Lilac Girls so disappointing.)

So where does The Alice Network fit within the spectrum of recent WWII novels? Quinn isn’t quite Kristin Hannah or Anthony Doerr but her writing was heads and shoulders above Martha Hall Kelly in my estimation. I enjoyed Quinn’s writing, but there wasn’t anything in particular that made me pause to re-read a paragraph or turn of phrase. Her writing was, however, clear, engaging, and relatable. It has mass appeal—it won’t be accused of needing an editor but no one is going to accuse it of being too high-brow either. It did get off to a bit of a slow start but a little over a third of the way in, the pace picked up and I didn’t want to put the book down.

Minor annoyances
I appreciated that the author made Charlie interested in math—any time I see a girl into STEM in a book I want to cheer. I’m not a STEM-er myself but since this particular interest in underrepresented, I like seeing it. For Charlie, however, Quinn went a little over the top. Charlie thinks in math equations that bordered on silly, detracted from the story, and impaired my ability to take Charlie seriously.

Sample equations included “One scribbled address plus one dash of resolve multiplied to the power of ten,” “Rose plus me equaled happiness,” and “bullets plus blood plus threats of imminent death equaled a certain intimacy.” There were one or two that were funny (“boy plus girl multiplied by whiskey and proximity” made me chuckle) but on the whole they were overdone and made Charlie seem frivolous rather than serious. In the end, silly equations multiplied by eyerolls equals a negative star.

My only other hangup in the book is how frequently one of the pregnant characters drank. She was frequently drunk and I was worried her child was going to be born well-pickled. Some Googling tells me that it wasn’t until the early 70s that doctors identified Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and a connection was solidly made between drinking and pregnancy, so this character’s drinking like a fish may have been consistent with the times. I just couldn’t take it, though. We know better now and so it seemed something that would be highly distracting to modern audiences. There are times when this character needs to be less inhibited so I could have been okay with it a few times but this too reached the point of frustration and distraction.

Conclusion
Tiny spoiler coming up—scroll if you want to skip it.
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The book does wrap up somewhat neater than is likely for someone who has suffered what Eve and Charlie have, though I don’t begrudge Quinn for the happy-ish ending. The Alice Network is a book that is going for mass appeal and isn’t the kind of book that ends with misery and woe. There are so many other things in novels that require the suspension of belief, that this relatively happy ending for Charlie and Eve doesn’t feel like a terrible stretch, even if aspects of it felt a bit too easy.

Notes
Published June 6, 2017 by William Morrow (@williammorrowbooks)
Author: Kate Quinn (@katequinn5975)
Date read: August 9, 2017
Rating: 4 Stars

Review: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

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“You know lily of the valley is poisonous, right?”
“So don’t eat it. At least not until you’ve finished speaking. Or if the crowd turns on you.”
 
Synopsis
Set on the eve of the German invasion of Poland, Lilac Girls tells the little-known story of the Rabbits of Ravensbruk–women who were the subject of cruel Nazi medical experiments.  Told in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of a Nazi doctor, a Polish teenager involved in the underground, and an American socialite dedicated to helping those less fortunate, Lilac Girls spans twenty years, exploring the long-lasting effects of both cruelty and hope on the human spirit.

Writing Style and Scope
I usually love WWII literature.  I studied history in undergrad and took every course I could on WWII and the immediate post-war years in Eastern Europe.  I adore All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale.  I read Mischling earlier this year and thought it was fantastic.  I came to Lilac Girls with high expectations, and that may have been part of the problem.

Overall, Kelly’s writing style completely missed the mark for me. There are witty moments (like the quote above); however, the entire book isn’t quite so snappily written. On the whole, Kelly’s word choice and writing style is pedestrian. There isn’t anything particularly unique or beautiful about the way that Kelly writes.

I do say this with the caveat that Kelly has accomplished something most people haven’t—she’s published an actual book. I have friends who are authors and I have seen the grueling work that goes into writing a book so I do not say this as if just anyone could write a book. It is an accomplishment that Kelly wrote a book like Lilac Girls and it was a worthy effort of her time to tell this particular story. There are many women in my online book club who read and enjoyed it and many people on Goodreads have rated it highly. My enjoyment of a book, however, is very tied to the language and so, for me, Lilac Girls fell flat.

I actually struggled a bit to find the selection I wanted to use as the quote for the book above in keeping with my usual format. There were a few witticisms here and there and there was an extended passage when one of the Rabbits goes to her death that was the only truly beautiful passage that made me pause—but it was far too long to quote.

In scope, Kelly was ambitious—the novel covers something like twenty years in under 500 pages. This passage of time does odd things to the pace and the narrative skips ahead several months at a time consistently. I do not think the book needed to be any longer by any means; however, the passage of time was not always clear (time was marked with years alone) so it was sometimes strange to see how much a character, place, or season had changed since the last chapter. I was constantly flipping back and forth, trying to determine where the character had left off last in time and approximately how much time it seemed had passed since then. Passing time this way made the book read unevenly.

Related to the swift and somewhat uneven passage of time, there were also a handful of asides when Kelly seemed to think she needed to throw in a bit of background note that read oddly, as if the characters were suddenly hitting pause and turning to the reader to explain some bit of history. Because Kelly didn’t have time or space to flesh the events out more evenly or naturally, she has to stop here and there and stage whisper to the reader the background of some event that happened in the intervening time between chapters. If this writing choice were more consistently used throughout the book, it might be one thing, but it seemed to be a device Kelly used infrequently and jarringly when she couldn’t think of another way to convey a piece of information.

Rabbits of Ravensbruk & Narrator Development
I commented on Instagram when I finished that I probably should have quit reading the book when I was 100 pages in and was feeling like the book was becoming a bit of a slog. The only thing that actually kept me reading was the Author’s Note. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the Rabbits themselves were real, though I hadn’t heard of this particular atrocity at Ravensbruk before, but was fascinated to hear that Herta Oberheuser and Caroline Ferriday were both real characters. (Well…that and book-quitter-guilt. But I’m working on overcoming that!) The pull to find out whether or not Herta would get her just desserts and what happened to Caroline were the only things that kept me reading. I didn’t particularly care about them as fictional characters but knowing they were real gave me enough motivation to keep going.

I searched Amazon after finishing and was a tad disappointed to see that there doesn’t appear to be a biography of Caroline Ferriday—I’d like to know her real story, and not just this fictionalized one. She was a fascinating woman—a former Broadway actress and socialite who used her connections, money, and social capital to enormously charitable ends, working to bring the Rabbits to the US for medical treatment for their lasting injuries after Ravensbruk and working to get them reparations from the German government.

I did find Kelly’s choice of character viewpoints to tell the story of the Rabbits interesting. Caroline and Kasia are whom you would expect for narrators in this kind of story.  I did, however, struggle a bit with Kasia’s voice. Kasia ages from sixteen when the book starts to forty. I would expect her voice to mature but there were moments—like when Kasia describes the medical “examination”/violation when she arrived at Ravensbruk—when Kasia’s teenager voice sounded way too old if it was supposed to be contemporary, teen Kasia talking and not adult Kasia looking back.

For the third narrator—Herta Oberheuser—to be a villain gave it a slightly unexpected twist. It always felt icky (as it absolutely should!) to read her section. She was an unrepentant Aryan-supremacist and her chapters read like it. I don’t say this to complain—Kelly gave Herta a few moments where we could see some internal struggle but didn’t apologize or temper her anti-Semitism. You do not like Herta and you aren’t supposed to. There is no apologist writing here.

American Evils
Kelly also deserves kudos for presenting the United States accurately, rather than sugar-coating our own misdoings. When I learned about WWII in school (which, admittedly, is becoming longer and longer ago), the United States was pretty consistently always presented as the White Knight. I applaud Kelly for using her characters to challenge this perception. In particular regarding immigration caps during the war, Kelly indicts Roosevelt and others for having knowledge of Hitler’s Final Solution including knowledge of the death camps, yet still turning away hundreds of thousands of refugees, essentially condemning them to certain death. In particular, she mentions the MS St. Louis—a ship of 900 German Jews turned away from our border in 1939. Over a quarter of them wound up dying in death camps after being forced to return to Europe.

Kelly also makes a point during a scene of the Nuremberg trials to mention American experiments on unwilling participants as well. Indeed, American doctors throughout history have also wrongfully tested various medications and treatments on prisoners and people of color without their informed consent, the most recent and well known being the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies which only ended in 1972.

Kelly could easily have left out these details as they had no bearing on the overall plot of the book. Many readers would have been none the wiser. It is to her credit that she did make a point several times to raise American complicity in medical testing on involuntary subjects and our government’s turning its back on refugees during the war. We may have won the war, but there were certainly moments where we could have acted more honorably to save many more lives.

Conclusion
While I would probably never personally recommend this book to anyone, I do see its general appeal. To the extent that a novel about atrocities committed in Hitler’s death camps can ever be considered “beachy reading,” that’s what it seems to me. It’s a book you buy in paperback, dog-ear the corners, splash some pool water on by accident, and then throw on a shelf when you’re done. The language is easy to digest and no one is tripping over three-dollar words.

The thing is, I like my three-dollar words. If the writing style and word choice aren’t important to you, the underlying story here and the character of Caroline Ferriday are compelling enough for the book to be enjoyable. For me, I found myself wishing the same story had been told by a more skilled hand.

Notes
Published: Ballantine Books
Author: Martha Hall Kelly (Instagram: @marthahallkelly)
Date Read: July 28, 2017
Rating: 2 stars