Tag: WWII

The Diamond Eye

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Kate Quinn
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pub. Date: Mar. 2022

Now here’s a review I wish I’d written earlier. HarperCollins kindly sent me a copy of The Diamond Eye when it was released in exchange for an honest review, but I held off reading it because my book club really wanted to read it together. I wrote this review back in October (just before my book club meeting to collect my thoughts), but I never got around to posting it.

This was my third Kate Quinn novel as I’ve also read The Alice Network and The Rose Code. I read The Rose Code with book club last year and that one is still probably my favourite of the 3, but I can’t decide which I liked better of the other two. The Diamond Eye is set between Ukraine and America during the second world war. Mila Pavlichenko already has sharp-shooter training when war breaks out and immediately signs up for the war effort. Women weren’t precluded from fighting in the Soviet Union and when her skills are noticed, she quickly starts making a name for herself and winds up with her own team of snipers. Her continued success earns her the title of Lady Death and eventually she is sent to the US to rally Americans to the cause and develops an unlikely friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.

The book starts out really strong. We learn of Mila’s history with her ex-husband and the child she’s been raising in his absence. It’s based on a true story and Mila herself is quite remarkable. That a single mother would have gotten her sharp-shooting certification at all is pretty intriguing, as is her success in the war. Women were so often relegated to the sidelines of the war effort – as nurses, or factory workers, or sometimes spies. But the Soviet Union allowed women on the front, which is quite unique on its own and presents a narrative I’ve not seen before in WWII fiction.

The first half of the book is really excellent. We accompany Mila as the Germans push the Soviets and the Soviets fight back. She develops both good and bad relationships with the men in her unit; succeeds despite the sexism of the senior male officials; and still has the odd verbal tussle with her frustrating ex, who is now a doctor in the war effort. The story is a little overly dramatized and I was annoyed that it followed a very similar sub-plot to The Rose Code, but otherwise, an excellent first half.

Unfortunately, the second half didn’t work as well for me. This book is too long. The entire second half of the book is set in America, but this plot wasn’t as engaging as the first half and was too dragged out. Had it been shorter, it might have been more effective, but I got bored around the 75% mark, which is a really bad part of the book to lose interest. Quinn takes a lot of liberty with the story in the second half and fabricates a lot of the central plot. Considering this book is centered around the real life of a real person, making up so much of the plot didn’t work for me. I felt that Quinn progressed the plot in intentionally dramatic ways and if those are not rooted in realism, it is a stain on the story. It makes the reader question what was based in fact and what was based in fiction. You have to commit one way or the other – either tell the truth, or create a fictional character with a different name. The Rose Code amalgamated several real people to form its fictional characters and I think that is a better approach if you want to deviate from real history. I don’t think you can have it both ways.

I think where this also lost me was the inclusion of another real life person, Eleanor Roosevelt, who is much more well known in real life than our protagonist. I didn’t know what to trust or where the line was for actual vs. fabricated history. The decision to include Eleanor’s “notes” and the POV of the gunmen were both interesting choices that definitely added to the drama of the story, but again, not the realism. Mila can anchor this story on her own. She is fascinating enough, Quinn didn’t need to bring Eleanor into the story in such a large way. I felt like it was a cheap way to build intrigue in the synopsis. I had similar thoughts about the inclusion of Prince Philip in The Rose Code, but I guess this is Quinn’s new thing and I’m sure it helps to sell books when you reference well-known historical figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Prince Philip.

Anyways, overall it is a good book and an interesting story. I learned a lot and was engaged through most of the book. It wasn’t everything it could have been, but it was entertaining. Taking a peak at goodreads, my rating is on the lower side compared to the rest of my book club, who enjoyed it more than me. I’m sitting at a solid 3 star read – not bad, not great.

The Rose Code

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Kate Quinn
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pub. Date: Mar. 2021 (read Jan. 2022)

The Rose Code was my book club pick for January. I read The Alice Network a few years ago and only half liked it, so I wasn’t super excited to pick this one up, especially given it was 650 pages, but I ended up quite liking it, despite some flaws.

One of the key things I didn’t like about The Alice Network was the modern day storyline – there is no modern day story in The Rose Code and I think this helped with my enjoyment of it. So many historical fiction novels seem to follow the formulaic approach of splitting the story between two timelines and while The Rose code does this to an extent, there’s no present day narrative, which I rarely find adds much to the novel. Instead, The Rose Code focuses most of the narrative during the war, while occasionally jumping forward a few years.

The narrative focuses on 3 female codebreakers working at Bletchley Park. The setting was somewhat familiar to me having watched The Imitation Game, but I felt this provided a much more nuanced approach. Osla and Mab are mysteriously called to Bletchley Park for a job interview and meet on the train. They billet together in the local village where they meet their landlady’s daughter, Beth. It’s never explicitly stated, but the reader can assume Beth lies somewhere on the spectrum and while she doesn’t pick up on a lot of social cues, she is great with puzzles and ends up working at Bletchley Park as well.

This book covers a lot of history. Bletchley Park is credited as being extremely important to the war effort, with hundreds of individuals spread across the campus working on different parts of codebreaking and translation. This is done for the sake of privacy so that no single individual comes to possess too much information. Osla is a wealthy socialite who speaks 3 languages and is in a secret relationship with Prince Philip, who she meets at the start of the war. Mab doesn’t run in the same circles as Osla, but is trying to elevate her position by searching for a wealthy husband. And Beth is just trying to get out from under the shadow of her abusive, god-fearing mother.

Without getting into spoilers, I found the author’s note to be very illuminating. Osla Kendall is based on a real person, Osla Benning (with obvious liberties taken), who was actually Prince Philip’s wartime girlfriend. Mab is completely fictionalized and Beth is an amalgamation of two real female codebreakers. But upon reading the author’s note, I would say that the majority of Quinn’s characters are the amalgamation of a subset of real people. She does a great job at taking as many real aspects from history as she can and incorporating them into her fictional story. I especially liked her inclusion of the mental hospital in this book and think she could have written an entire book just on this topic.

Last year I read Kate Moore’s book, The Woman They Could Not Silence, which is about how many women would often be locked up in mental institutions, not because they were mentally ill, but as a way to oppress or silence them, often at the hands of their husbands, brothers, or fathers. It’s a fascinating subject in itself – had I not read Kate Moore’s book, I might have thought Quinn was including the hospital for dramatic effect, but actually I had no trouble believing this frustrating narrative and I think she did a really good job a capturing the sexism and injustice of it all.

I liked that each of the characters came from a different socio-economic backgrounds – it really gave a good scope of the war and struggles faced. I really liked Mab and thought the inclusion of her love story really well done. Each of the women had their own struggles and challenges, but they were all fully realized characters with a lot of character development.

So what didn’t I like about this book? There were really just 2 things. The first is that the book is far too long. Quinn goes REALLY in depth about codebreaking, and while it is interesting, I didn’t have a lot of context for it and I don’t think she really explained rodding and the bombe machines in a way that I could meaningfully understand how they worked. I found the narrative got a bit repetitive over time and I’m not exaggerating when I say I think she could have cut out at least 200 pages. It felt like there was a lot more filler than there needed to be.

The second thing I didn’t really like was the inclusion of Prince Philip’s relationship with Osla. This is set as the foundation of the entire story, with Quinn counting down the days to the royal wedding while we get flashbacks to the war. I think a lot of people are fascinated to learn that Philip has a wartime girlfriend, but I felt more along the lines of, why wouldn’t he? At the end of the day, the royal wedding and Osla’s relationship don’t actually have that much bearing on the story and I thought it was odd to center the entire narrative around it. For me, the codebreakers were the focal point of the story and I found the royal wedding to be distracting and tangential. I felt like Quinn discovered all these historical figures and just tried to cram as many as she could into one story without thinking critically about whether they belonged there. Or maybe she just thought a story with a byline about Prince Philip would sell, in which case, she’s not wrong because people lap up stories about the royal family.

Overall I just found the story took awhile to get going. I was glued to the page for the entire last third of the book, but it’s a bit of work to get there and I felt weary about it given the length of the book. Shorten this baby a bit and I think it would be even more inviting and accessible to readers. I do appreciate what Quinn has done in telling this story about Bletchley Park though. For a long time Bletchley Park was a hidden part of England’s history, and it’s exciting that the general public now gets the chance to learn about it. So 4 stars from me, which is still a great rating, despite its shortcomings.

Lovely War

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Julie Berry
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pub. Date: Mar. 2019 (read Apr. 2021 on Audible)

Lovely War is another book that I found on Booktube. Hailey from Hailey in Bookland recommended it and I was really intrigued after I read the synopsis. I know Greek re-tellings are all the rage right now, but personally they’ve never really been my thing, but the idea of the Greek Gods narrating a human love story set in WW1 is somehow way more compelling to me. I was expecting something similar to the Book Thief, so I was pretty amped.

I did enjoy this book, but I would probably rate it more like 3.5 stars than 4 stars because it just wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be. The premise of the story is that when Hephaestus catches his wife Aphrodite having an affair with Ares, she convinces him to let her explain herself through the telling of a great human love affair (more or less – to be honest I thought the reasoning for her telling the whole story was somewhat weak). So she launches into a story about 2 couples during World War 1.

I think the key reason I wasn’t 100% sold on this book is because, even though I was invested in these 2 loves stories, at the end of the day, they just weren’t quite moving enough for me to be like “yeah, I understand why the God of Love was so moved by them”. I mean what would be epic enough for Aphrodite to take notice? I honestly have no idea, but I’ve definitely felt more moved by other stories.

I do wonder if I might have enjoyed this better as a paperback. I read it as an audiobook and I didn’t think the dialogue quite passed the audio test. I find audiobooks to be particularly good at exposing sub-par writing and dialogue. I didn’t think the writing was sub-par, but I can’t deny the dialogue definitely came across as a bit cheesy, which I think overall took away from the story. It’s hard to think of a couple as having a great love story when you’re rolling your eyes at some of their conversations.

So that was my biggest flaw with the book, but I do want to talk about what I liked, because there was still lots to like in this book! Namely, Aubrey Edwards. Hazel and James, in my opinion, are just another run of the mill love story, I know things go awry for them in the way things always do in war stories, but there was nothing in their relationship that I thought really made them special. Likewise, I did think parts of Aubrey and Collette’s love story were somewhat disappointing as I didn’t really feel their personal chemistry, but I was super enthralled with Aubrey’s story because it is really what sets this book apart from other WW1 books.

Because Aubrey is a Black American from the 15th New York infantry. Maybe I’m not reading the right books, but I can’t think of any popular WW books that focus on Black people. I thought this was such a great addition to the story because BIPOC are so often left out of this era of history. There’s a ton of literature focusing on slavery and the civil rights movement, but we tend to think of the world wars as a part of white history. But in the same way that Black Americans have been present for every part of America’s history (since European contact), they are often left out of the narrative. Did many Black divisions serve in the World Wars? No, but it’s as much a part of Black history as it is the history of white Americans, so I really liked seeing Aubrey’s experience represented. Plus, his experience offered something totally new. Rather than just another war romance, his was a perspective that forced me to consider something new.

Aubrey comes to Europe wanting to fight, the same as any shiny-eyed soldier. But even with the nightmare that trench warfare is, Black soldiers still weren’t considered good enough for it. Let the glory go to the White troops, Black troops were good for manual labour. Building roads and digging the trenches, all the while making sure to keep themselves separate from the White soldiers. The biggest threat Aubrey’s Regiment faces is that they’ll get on the wrong side of a trumped up White soldier who wants to make sure Black Americans remember their place in the world.  The irony being that you could go all the way to France to fight Hitler and be killed by your own compatriot. 

So Aubrey’s story was both eye-opening, but not overly surprising. It’s inspiring the optimism his Regiment carried around with them, that serving in the war would serve to elevate the position of African Americans. I also really liked how music tied in so closely with the theme and that we got exposure to the birth of the jazz age. To be honest I was more interested in the links between war and music, rather than the central theme about war and love. 

In conclusion, it’s hard to rate the book because while I was less enamoured with some parts, there were other parts I loved. Most disappointing was that overall, I just didn’t think that having the Greek Gods narrate the story actually added that much to  it. It makes the framing of your key themes a lot easier, but you could still explore the same themes without the Gods. But it’s by no means a bad book and I still really enjoyed it – I would have just liked to flip the narrative and have Aubrey as the focal character rather than Hazel. Would still recommend!

The Lost Vintage

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Ann Mah
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pub. Date: Jun. 2018 (read Apr. 2021)

The Lost Vintage has been on my TBR for years and I finally read it! It first came on my radar when I read an interview with the author that talked about the historical violence that has been perpetuated against women during war time. There is a plethora of literature out there about WWII (honestly I think there’s too much – I’d really like to see more about non-western countries and other time periods), but a lot of what is published about WWII focuses either on the holocaust or interesting historical stories (ie, a nurse during the blitz, a secret resistance worker, a pilot behind enemy lines, etc). The Lost Vintage focuses on German-occupied France, a topic that I’ve definitely read more than one book about, but I was immediately intrigued to explore the hidden (and not so hidden) violence against women.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely other books out there on this topic. Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale is the first that comes to mind, but even books like Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants series explore how in Germany’s defeat, an overwhelming number of women were raped by Russian soldiers as their spoils of war. But what I have been particularly interested in, and the main reason I wanted to read this book, is how ‘collaborators’ were treated in the liberation. I’m sorry to say, that before a few years ago, it wasn’t something I had given that much thought to. 

A couple of years ago I read Mark Sullivan’s book, Beneath a Scarlet Sky. I strongly disliked the writing in the book, but it was based on a true story and as much as I disliked a lot of the book, there’s one scene at the end of the book that I constantly think of. This book took place in Milan and at the end of the war, the people of Italy basically mobbed the entire country, hanging Mussolini in the street and shaming, abusing, and killing tons of women that were seen as collaborators. Though Europe is filled with people who ‘collaborated’ during the war, the benefit of time is that it has allowed us to examine those whose collaboration was inexcusable (people who sold out their neighbours for personal gain) and those whose collaboration was more a victim of circumstance (accepting food to feed your family in exchange for personal favours to a German official). “Horizontal Collaboration” was strongly condemned after the war, despite the fact that many women were in fact victims of German occupation and power.

What’s so enraging about this is the fact that after the war, European citizens (of several countries) essentially enacted mob and vigilante justice on both real and perceived collaborators. I definitely believe in war tribunals and prosecuting those who are responsible for war crimes – but much of this justice was enacted without trial or evidence. In a mob-like fever, people we’re dragged from their homes and citizen justice was performed in the streets. What’s so enraging about it now, and what Ann Mah touches on briefly in her book, is that many of the people directing this justice were actually male collaborators themselves (point the finger first lest it be pointed at you instead), and that most of the ‘justice’ was perpetrated against women, particularly women who were perceived to have slept with the enemy. It ignores the fact that many women were taken advantage of and raped, and in the case of this book, required absolutely no evidence. 

So this is obviously a topic I’m pretty passionate about, but what about this book? This is basically just an extended background rant about what inspired me to pick up The Lost Vintage. The Lost Vintage does grapple with questions of collaboration, and interestly, heritage. Everyone wants to believe that if they had lived through WWII they would have been on the side of the resistance. That they would have been empathetic to the plight of Jews and fought against tyranny. But war and poverty make us do desperate things and when we discover that our family history might be more than a little embarrassing, what do we do about that? 

So The Lost Vintage raised a lot of interesting topics and questions for me, but I credit it to my own interest rather than what the author actually delivered because unfortunately, this book left a lot to be desired. It had a lot of potential, but there were two core storylines taking place and the one the author devotes most of her time to is the wine storyline.

The Lost Vintage is a about a wine expert, Kate, who is trying to pass the ultimate exam in the world of sommeliers – the Master of Wine certificate. In order to prepare for her final exam, she travels to her mother’s childhood home in Burgundy, a wine estate that has been passed down through her family for generations. While in Burgundy, she discovers a number of relics in the family cellar, including a cache of expensive wines from the war. She begins to search both for information on her family heritage, as well as the missing bottles of a very expensive, lost vintage.

This was the author’s debut novel and while it shows a lot of promise, it had a lot of the trappings of a debut novel. The writing is not engaging and the format and pacing of the book just didn’t work for me. It has a very slow start and I was more than halfway through the book before I finally got into it. The author dedicates a lot of time to Kate and her wine exam. It’s clear the author knows a lot about wine and this might be interesting to those ensconced in the wine world, but for me (and my entire book club), we wanted to know more about Kate’s family history and the diaries of her great-aunt Helene. 

Mah does deliver on the plot points relating to female collaboration, and I did enjoy the thought exercise of reflecting on what it means to discover collaborators in your family tree, but I don’t think Mah did the topic justice. First of all, I thought that Kate’s reaction to discovering a collaborator in her history was an over-reaction. I feel like there must be a lot of people in France with similar histories and given the benefit of time, we now understand that the accusation of ‘collaborator’ from mob justice really didn’t mean a whole lot. I was able to forgive Heather’s reaction because she was Jewish, but overall I thought the entire family over-reacted and didn’t show a whole lot of maturity by just refusing to speak of Helene for 80 years.

Besides that, the book had a lot of flaws. I feel like the author had the core idea for her book and didn’t know what to do beyond that. She tried some things to increase the suspense, but none of it worked with the rest of the narrative. Characters like Walker and Louise were absolutely pointless and I found the trajectory of the love story jarring and thought the characters had no chemistry. There was so much potential that was just wasted. I wanted to see a more equal split between Kate and Helene’s story (the focus is disproportionately on Kate) and I wanted to see a better exploration of what I thought were going to be the key themes. I felt the author knew everything there was to know about wine, but was just lazy in the rest of the writing. 

But I still gave this book 3 stars so what gives? I do think this was a good story – it was just a good story, poorly told. Similar to Mark Sullivan’s, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, I still wanted to read the story, I just wanted to experience it from a more experienced author. 

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Heather Morris
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pub. date: Sep. 2018 (read Apr. 2020 on Audible)

This was supposed to be my book club pick for March, but then of course our meeting was cancelled and I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a holocaust book during a global pandemic. We’ve rescheduled our book club meeting so I decided to give the audiobook a go since I’ve been struggling with paperbacks recently, but have been doing a lot of jigsaws. This was definitely the way to go and a flew through this short book and my latest jigsaw in a single weekend.

Aside from the whole pandemic thing, I still wasn’t really looking forward to reading this because I’ve read a lot of holocaust books over the years and though there’s many great and emotional books on the topic, after reading so many books about the camps I find not a lot of new content offered anymore, so it’s just easier not to read such upsetting works.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz does offer a point of view I haven’t seen before, that of a Jewish prisoner conscripted to work as the tatowierer who inks all of the prisoners with their number when they enter the camps. It was an interesting story in that is was told from the point of view of someone who received preferential treatment in the camps. Lale was spared from physical labour and given his own room in one of the camp blocks. He didn’t have to report for roll calls and so was able to move about the camp a lot easier than many other prisoners would have been able to. He uses this privilege to build up a bit of an underground trade. The girls who go through the prisoners clothing provide him with jewels, which he trades for extra food. Building up a stockpile which he shares with other prisoners and uses to cash in on favours.

Unfortunately this book made me really uncomfortable, but not in the way you might expect a holocaust story to make one feel uncomfortable. I feel like I might be a bit callous in critiquing a story such as this one, but there were 3 issues I had with the story.

First of all, on Lale’s first night in the camp, he is stunned to see two men shot and killed for sport by the Nazis while using the bathroom. Upon witnessing this act, he vows that he will do whatever it takes to survive the camp. That’s all good and I admire his tenacity, but Morris revisits this theme several times throughout the novel and I felt like I was supposed to believe that Lale survived Auschwitz out of sheer force of character. This was not the case – he relies heavily on the kindness of others, which he takes advantage of to improve his own situation and that of those he cares about. But on more than one occasion his life is saved by other individuals. This in itself isn’t a big deal, but pushing the narrative that Lale’s grit is what enabled his survival is belittling to all the people that didn’t make it out of the camps. Grit and determination have literally nothing to do with surviving the atrocities of a concentration camp. Lale traded on the kindness of others and was incredibly lucky. I don’t find any fault in Lale’s actions, but let’s just call it what it is.

The second issue that bothered me, and what made this an uncomfortable read for me, was the love story between Lale and Gita. I can’t say I’ve ever read a love story set in a holocaust camp. I’ve read so many beautiful holocaust stories in which love is the central theme, but definitely not a ‘meet and fall in love in a camp’ story. Again, the idea of a couple falling in love in a concentration is not that unbelievable – this is based on the true story of real life couple Lale and Gita, so it obviously happened, but the writing about the love story just made me soooo uncomfortable.

Like I said, I believe two individuals could fall in love in a camp. Under unthinkable emotional trauma, it would be natural to seek comfort and reassurance from those around you. To be brought together by your shared experience and build a deep and lasting bond of trust and understanding. I didn’t struggle to believe that Gita would fall in love with Lale, he looked after her most basic needs, found her better work, food, and medication, and provided emotional support through a traumatic experience. But please don’t try and portray this relationship as sexy. Lale and Gita were both victims of their situation and I really think the author grossly romanticized their relationship. I know this is based on a true story, but it’s also based on one man’s 70 year old memories. Maybe this is the way Lale remembered his experience, but this is still “fiction” and the author has a duty to question how those memories may have been manipulated an warped over the years to block out a traumatic experience.

I find it hard to believe that after living several years in a concentration camp, being beaten and starved, that anyone would use a chocolate bar to try and seduce someone. In general I just couldn’t help but cringe at all of the romance scenes. Especially how Lale talked about women – how “all women are beautiful” and you have to take care of women, and what a womanizer he was. It was so eye-rolling, but again, obvious that it was probably lifted straight from her interview with Lale. Of course an old man who grew up in the 1930’s would talk like that, but nothing about it felt genuine or reflective of how Lale actually might have felt in 1942.

But this is just one example of the ways in which I struggled to buy into the story and felt Morris’ should have taken more artistic license in how she told it. Everything about Lale’s experience seemed to be romanticized. How easy it was for him to trade in diamonds and food, how he was able to manipulate almost everyone around him to get what he wanted, how no part of the camp was closed off to him and he could pretty much just do and go where ever he wanted, how easy it was for him to survive an interrogation without breaking down, and then just pick up the pieces of his fabricated life in the camp once he was released again. I don’t disbelieve that this was the account Morris’ received from Lale, but again, it’s where your duty to history and the reader comes in to question the authenticity of those experiences and how your portrayal of a concentration camp might read to those who have lived through similar, though very different experiences. I felt the author failed to portray the horror of the concentration camps, which should really be the easiest part of the story.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz reminded me a lot of another WWII book I read a few years ago, Beneath a Scarlet Sky. Both are fascinating stories in themselves, but both books were inspired by late-in-life interviews with their subjects. In both books I think the authors rely too heavily on the source material from their interviewees and somehow fail to connect to their characters on an emotional level.

Which brings me to my final point. This book was poorly written. This is more a flawed chronological account of Lale’s 3 years in the camps than a meaningful piece of historical fiction. Morris relies heavily on dialogue and plot to carry her story, but misses out on any kind of characterization. Somehow an emotional story of 3 terrible years in concentration camps lacks in any real emotional connection. Now obviously this is a personal opinion. I know a lot of people really loved this and connected with Lale, so it makes me feel like a bit of troll saying that I didn’t feel anything from a holocaust story, but I just felt that Morris didn’t give these characters the humanity they deserved. Her writing style is very detached and as such, I always felt detached as well. The story just seemed to be “and then he did this and then he said this and then she did that”. It was just kind of boring.

It was a story with a lot of promise, and like I said, it does show a different experience of life at Auschwitz, but I just wanted more from it. Lale is a flawed individual and I would have loved to see more exploration of how his morality was impacted by his time in the camp. He alludes a few times that he was worried he might be considered a collaborator and I would have liked to see more of that internal struggle. He was a generally selfless person and i felt he likely would also have struggled with the fact that he couldn’t help everyone and the impact having to decide who he would help might also have on him. At 250 pages, there was certainly room to better develop this story, so I was disappointed that the author decided to just retell an interview rather than do the hard emotional reflection on how this experience would impact Lale and those around him.

I think I’ll end it there. I could probably say more, but this is getting long enough. I see there’s a sequel. I am intrigued that it’s about Cilka, she is one of the characters that I probably empathized with the most and it was really upsetting to learn she was convicted as a collaborator. I’m curious if her sequel is fabricated or actually based on a real person. Anyone know? I won’t be reading it either way, but I am intrigued.