I absolutely hate reading books about war because they upset me so much. I usually end up angry and crying. Or angry and with a headache because I’m trying not to cry. Basically, it all just upsets the crap out of me and I don’t like it. The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, is no exception. I didn’t think it would be and although it was on my To-Read list, I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to reading it if it wasn’t selected by my book […]
“We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us.”
I have had this book on my to read list since CBR5 in 2013. This year I decided as part of my overall Cannonball goal of 78 books, that I was also going to work my way through my audiobook and owned book backlog. A little. With that goal in mind I set up a monthly goal list, with a book or two I already own, a book or two I have in audio form in Audible, and then I pick a couple more to […]
A story of untold heroes
For the most part, you know what you’re getting when you read a book that takes place during World War II and is set in a location that was occupied by Germany. Even if you find a book or movie that tells an inspirational or uplifting story within that backdrop, it’s always delivered with the requisite edge of horror. How could it not? There is no story to tell from that period in human history that isn’t tainted by the atrocity. I’m not sure if […]
Nazi Hunting in High Places
This debut novel by author Cara Black centers around her heroine Aimee Leduc, a French female private eye who gets mixed up with violent neo-Nazi skinheads, Jewish survivors of the holocaust, and a secret Nazi organization which is staging a comeback and whose tentacles reach into the highest offices in Europe. The author’s scope is ambitious, her history fascinating, her writing is evocative, and I give her extra kudos for creating a female PI when the genre is so male-centric. But her novel’s biggest weakness, […]
Little Known Story of Italian-Jewish Resistance in WWII
This amazing novel tells the story of ordinary men and women—farmers, soldiers, priests and nuns, housewives, doctors, stonemasons—who took a stance against the Nazi juggernaut in Italy and waged a near hopeless war of resistance not only in defense of their homeland but in defense of Jews from throughout Europe who had fled across the Alps into an Italy which had broken with Germany, thinking to find a refuge from the genocide, only to discover that the Germans were occupying Italy and prepared to escalate […]