What better way to start the last month of 2022 then with a 5 ⭐️ book. It’s John Boyne’s mesmerizing novel, All the Broken Places. Where some novels entertain by skating along the surface, this book plumbs the deepest depths of the human psyche, hunting the meaning of complicity during one of history’s darkest chapters. Gretel is a widow in her 90s living in a ... Read More...
Annelies by David Gillham
As much as I love historical fiction, there are some people who should be left to history rather than brought back in fiction. After reading David Gillham’s Annelies I believe Anne Frank is one of these. She is too deeply imbued by her own writing, the writing she left behind to be reconsidered by another writer. Gillham uses the premise of Anne surviving Bergen-Belsen and ... Read More...
The Book of Aron
Set in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland The Book of Aron is, like any Holocaust novel, difficult reading. But what makes it so, is not graphic depictions of violence against Jews it is the interminable grind of life lived in circumstances that have nowhere to go but down. At first, it is simply that the community is being segregated as a health precaution against typhus. ... Read More...
Helga’s Diary
Helga Weiss is an eleven-year-old girl living in Prague in 1939. The words above are hers as are all the words in the book, Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp. Czechoslovakia has been invaded by the Nazis and in a few short months Helga has seen her carefree life change to one of rules and regulations. By 1941 she and her family ... Read More...
