Rainy Day Reads

This is a piece of historical fiction set against the background of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff,   a ship carrying over 10,000 refugees, wounded soldiers and crew. The ship set out from Gotenhafen, now known as Gdynia, in present-day Poland at the end of January 1945. At the time the city was under German control and it was used as a naval base. At the end of the war it became a corralling point for refugees trying to escape the advancing Russian army and gain passage on a ship to safety.   In this story we follow four young people, each with their own motives and secrets. We have Alfred, the young German soldier, who believes in Hitler’s cause insofar as it doesn’t interrupt his plans for himself, Florian the Prussian who is enacting a scheme of revenge, Joana, a young Lithuanian woman who feels guilty for the people lost to the war and Emilia, a Polish girl who has gotten lost in the mire of war.  The four of them meet up on the road to Gotenhaf...

I picked this up on a whim at the library. I think I have said a few times that I don’t really like reading crime/mystery novels, so you might wonder why I would pick this up, since it is blurbed as such. It’s because I’m a sucker for historical fiction. Especially ones that involve some sort of riddle or mystery. This book isn’t really historical fiction, as it is set in present day, but it is based on one of the most persistent conspiracy theories out there; the fact that some of the Romanovs survived the execution in 1918. The theory is largely based on the fact that the bodies of the son, Alexej, and one of the daughters, often believed to be Anastasia, but there is no certain proof, were not found along with the other bodies. However these last missing bodies were found in 2007, 3 years after the publication of this book, finally laying the Romanovs and the conspiracy theory to rest.   This book is about an American lawyer, Miles Lord, who has come to Russia to ...