Rainy Day Reads

One of my favorite settings is wartime. It doesn’t specifically have to be World War II, there is just a lot of great fiction set during this time period. I feel kind of bad saying that World War II is a favorite setting of mine, because this was very much a real time and place with real people living through atrocities, and large numbers of people not surviving. If feels wrong to exploit that for my pleasure, but at the same time I do think these books are important. They tell the personal stories of the people of the time, and if not based directly on true events they can share snippets of the history that may have drowned in the larger telling of the historical events. If it is done well, that is. Below are 5 books that I think are not only great fiction, but that gave me new insight into the history of a period I thought I was pretty well versed in.   City of Thieves by David Benioff This is the story about Lev, a young boy in Leningrad during the Nazi siege...

I picked this book up because I thought the premise sounded interesting. It tells the tale of the Warszava Zoo and how it was used as a hideout for Jews and resistance members during the Second World War. It is based on a true story and mainly gets its details from the diary of the director’s wife, who chronicled her life and work during the years of the occupation.  I was under the impression that this would be a fictionalized account based on the facts in the diary, but I soon discovered that it was actually more of a retelling of the events in the diary interspersed with facts and stories from other sources. I had looked forward to a retelling of an interesting, personal story from the war, as I always find these kinds of stories interesting, but instead I essentially ended up reading a non-fiction book. I kept waiting for the story to shift into “fiction-gear” but it never happened. Once I resigned myself to that fact, the story was still interesting, but I did no...

I saw this book making its way around Booktube and there was nothing but rave reviews, and the story line sounded really interesting, so I decided to pick it up.  The story follows a young girl from Lithuania. She and her family are arrested and deported by the Soviets along with a number of other people from all over the country in 1941. We follow their journey to the forced labour camps and their struggle to survive the cruelty of the Soviets.  I must say I have mixed feelings about this book. The first part very much reminded me about every story I’ve ever read about the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps during World War II, and while that story is extremely important to tell, I started to wonder if this book was going to bring anything new to the table. In the end I think it did. The story is so similar to that of the Jewish deportations, that it’s hard to remember that it’s actually something different. If you changed  the NKVD (Soviet pol...

Holy smokes, this book was just what I needed! Finally a good book after I have been struggling with some less than great books these past weeks. The story is set during World War II and follows two British women who both work in the war effort. The book had me gripped tight right from the start, the writing is beautiful and the story is compelling.  I feel like I shouldn't give too much away about the plot, but basically the two women end up in France behind enemy lines. One of them is caught and questioned by the Gestapo, and she must reveal her mission or face torture.  Beware of spoiler-ish notes below!!! The book is divided into two parts. The first is like a set up of the story and telling how Verity came to be in the Gestapo headquarters. During the entirety of this part the author had me questioning if Verity really was telling the truth or if she was somehow trying to cheat the Gestapo and buy more time for herself. But the story she told, the information she gave awa...