Rainy Day Reads

Challenges:   Around the Year in 52 Books: A category from another challenge (my Bingo Board reading challenge) Bingo Board reading challenge: Read The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah Along with “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr I think this was probably the most hyped WWII book of this year. I say this year. Apparently they were actually published in 2015 and 2014 respectively, according to Goodreads, but I feel like this is the year they really became known (and hyped).  This book follows two French sisters during the Nazi invasion and occupation of France. Vianne is quiet, shy and just wants to keep her family safe, while Isabelle is brash and confrontational and looking for anyone to love her like she has been craving since childhood. It’s quite hard to give a brief synopsis of this book as there are so many things going on. Not only is there the Nazi occupation forces to worry about, but the small family has its own deep wounds to try and hea...

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...