Rainy Day Reads

This is a non-fiction account detailing how three brothers built an entire Jewish community under the noses of the Nazi invaders in the Belorussian area during World War II.   I had never heard of this story before, and I doubt many people have, even though this group of Jewish people was one of the largest to be saved during the war. The story itself is fascinating. We follow the Bielski family, as they endure a number of discriminatory acts from diverse governments and the civilian population in their area, even before the arrival of the Nazis. When the Nazis come the family first try to tough it out, but after the death of the parents and the many mass killings three of the brothers decide to make a run for the forest to try and bring their family through the war in hiding. At first it is only extended family, and the small group manages to hide somewhat easily in the massive woods, but soon hundreds of escapees from the ghettos in surrounding cities join the group. H...

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...

Review: The Dawn by Elie Wiesel Challenges:  Read the World, Europe (hosted over on habitica.com )  This is the second book in the trilogy that starts with Night (review here ). The first book detailed the author’s experiences as a young boy in the German concentration camps during the war and this book takes place a few years after that. This seems to be a fictionalized continuation of the story. Elisha has come to Palestine and joined the Israeli resistance fighting for a free Israel. We follow him during one night when he is awaiting dawn when he must execute a man as part of the freedom struggle.  The book is quite short but it still packs a punch. We follow the musings of this young boy, who has literally been through hell, when he is about to be on the other side of the battle. He has some moral struggles, but doesn't really seem to question the fact that he will do it in the end. He seemed to acknowledge both that he had been brainwashed by his comra...

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...

Challenges:   Bingo: Night by Elie Wiesel Diversity Bingo 2017: Jewish Main Character This book is set during World War II and our protagonist is Eliezer, a young boy living in Transylvania with his family. Soon the Nazis make their arrival and Eliezer and his family are first forced to move into a ghetto with other Jews and then they are moved to a camp.  This book is told from the perspective of Eliezer, and we follow his struggle with faith as these harrowing things unfold. He started as a devout Jewish scholar who wanted nothing more than to study the Jewish mysteries, but at the end of the book he is deeply questioning his faith.  This book is quite short but very powerful and while there are many books dealing with the Holocaust I think this one has a bit of something more, as we follow Eliezer’s internal struggles with faith and morals as well as the external struggle to just survive.  I gave this book 5 stars out of 5. 

I almost gave up on this book before I really got started, because I didn’t feel like reading another badly written WWII book. I assumed this would be a book with a number of family anecdotes tenuously tied up with the actions of the war. But luckily I was wrong. This was really well written and in no way boring or disjointed. It is based on Albright’s experiences during the war, but more so her father’s as she was only a very young child at that point. Her father meanwhile, worked for the displaced Czechoslovakian government in London during the war and he was a diplomat before and after the war. Albright ties together his work and musings about their country with events in the war in an engaging and instructive way. I learnt a lot about the war, a subject which I considered myself pretty well versed in, before I read this book. But reading about the lead up to the war and the events that took place in Central Europe while Hitler aggressively moved his plans along and the Wes...

I loved this book! It was suspenseful, fast paced without being rushed and had an interesting cast of characters.   This book is set in an alternate universe where the Nazis won the war. Hitler has expanded his empire and rules it with an iron fist. Meanwhile the resistance plots to take him down. They plan to do this by having one of their agents, Yael, win the annual motorcycle race between the axis powers, Germany and Japan. A victory will ensure an audience with Hitler bringing Yael close enough to kill him. In order to race she has to pretend to be last year’s victor, Adele Wolfe. This is one of my few qualms with this book. Yael has the power to skinshift, essentially changing her appearance to look exactly like someone else. This power was…obtained (for lack of a better word) in the Nazi death camp where a doctor experimented on the young girl and somehow infused her with the power to change her appearance. This is the only fantastical element in the story, and wh...

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...