Two WWII Reviews: Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation & The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

 

I'm waaay behind on reviews, so I decided to review these two WWII books together and put my reviews for them in one post.

Both books that definitely distressing. 

Let's dive right in!

Review: In the Realm of Ash and Sorrow

Author: Kenneth W. Harmon

Started reading: October 18th 2020

Finished the book: DNF

Pages: 352

Genres: Historical, War, Japan

Published: January 2nd 2020

Source: Netgalley

Goodreads score: 4.49

My score:

Synopsis

When bombardier Micah Lund dies on a mission over Hiroshima, his spirit remains trapped in the land of his enemies. Dazed, he follows Kiyomi Oshiro, a war widow struggling to care for her young daughter, Ai. Food is scarce, work at the factory is brutal, and her in-laws treat her like a servant.

Watching Kiyomi and Ai together, Micah reconsiders his intolerance for the people he’d called the enemy. As his concern for the mother and daughter grows, so does his guilt for his part in their suffering. Micah finds a new reality when Kiyomi and Ai dream—one which allows him to interact with them. While his feelings for Kiyomi deepen, imminent destruction looms. Hiroshima is about to be bombed, and Micah must warn Kiyomi and her daughter. In a place where dreams are real, Micah races against time to save the ones he loves the most.

Review: Crusade in Jeans

Author: Thea Beckman

Started reading: September 4th 2020

Finished the book: September 26th 2020

Pages: 307

Genres: Historical, YA, Adventure

Published: 1973

Source: Physical copy

Goodreads score: 4.03

My score:

Synopsis

Fifteen-year-old Dolf uses a prototype time machine and gets stuck in the Middle Ages. Trying to find his way back to the twentieth century, he joins a children's crusade of almost ten thousand children on their way to the Holy Land. Dolf helps the children defy the terrible mountains, conquer disease and fight evil knights. Slowly, Dolf begins to realize that the real danger does not lurk behind the next mountaintop, but rather within the crusade itself.

Review: The Storm Sister (The Seven Sisters #2)

Author: Lucinda Riley

Started reading: August 2nd 2020

Finished the book: August 25th 2020

Pages: 608

Genres: Fiction, Historical, Romance

Published: March 22nd 2016

Source: Bought the book

Goodreads score: 4.27

My score:

Synopsis

Ally D'Aplièse is about to compete in one of the world's most perilous yacht races, when she hears the news of her adoptive father's sudden, mysterious death. Rushing back to meet her five sisters at their family home, she discovers that her father - an elusive billionaire affectionately known to his daughters as Pa Salt - has left each of them a tantalising clue to their true heritage.

Ally has also recently embarked on a deeply passionate love affair that will change her destiny forever. But with her life now turned upside down, Ally decides to leave the open seas and follow the trail that her father left her, which leads her to the icy beauty of Norway...

Review: The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3)

Author: Katherine Arden

Started reading: May 29th 2020

Finished the book: June 19th 2020

Pages: 384

Genres: Fantasy, History, Fairy Tale

Published: January 8th 2019

Source: Bought the book

Goodreads score: 4.51

My score:

Synopsis

Now Moscow has been struck by disaster. Its people are searching for answers—and for someone to blame. Vasya finds herself alone, beset on all sides. The Grand Prince is in a rage, choosing allies that will lead him on a path to war and ruin. A wicked demon returns, stronger than ever and determined to spread chaos. Caught at the center of the conflict is Vasya, who finds the fate of two worlds resting on her shoulders. Her destiny uncertain, Vasya will uncover surprising truths about herself and her history as she desperately tries to save Russia, Morozko, and the magical world she treasures. But she may not be able to save them all.

Review: The Nightingale

Author: Kristin Hannah
Started reading: March 8th 2020
Finished the book: April 10th 2020
Pages: 440
Genres: Historical, Fiction, War, Adult
Published: February 3rd 2015
Source: Received the book as a gift
Goodreads score: 4.57
My score:

Synopsis

In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

FRANCE, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.

Review: The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy #2)

Author: Katherine Arden
Started reading: March 17th 2020
Finished the book: April 10th 2020
Pages: 363
Genres: Fantasy, Historical, Fairy Tale
Published: December 5th 2017
Source: Bought the book
Goodread score: 4.37
My score:

Synopsis

The magical adventure begun in The Bear and the Nightingale continues as brave Vasya, now a young woman, is forced to choose between marriage or life in a convent and instead flees her home—but soon finds herself called upon to help defend the city of Moscow when it comes under siege.
Orphaned and cast out as a witch by her village, Vasya’s options are few: resign herself to life in a convent, or allow her older sister to make her a match with a Moscovite prince. Both doom her to life in a tower, cut off from the vast world she longs to explore. So instead she chooses adventure, disguising herself as a boy and riding her horse into the woods. When a battle with some bandits who have been terrorizing the countryside earns her the admiration of the Grand Prince of Moscow, she must carefully guard the secret of her gender to remain in his good graces—even as she realizes his kingdom is under threat from mysterious forces only she will be able to stop.

Review: All the Light We Cannot See

Author: Anthony Doerr
Started reading: January 31st 2020
Finished the book: March 11th 2020
Pages: 531
Genres: Historical, War, Fiction
Published: May 6th 2014
Source: Received as a gift
Goodreads score: 4.33
My score:

Synopsis

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Review: The Bear and the Nightingale (Winternight Trilogy #1)

Author: Katherine Arden
Started reading: January 1st 2020
Finished the book: January 20th 2020
Pages: 323
Genres: Fantasy, Historical, Fairy Tale
Published: January 10th 2017
Source: Bought the Ebook
Goodreads score: 4.12
My score: 

Synopsis

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.

After Vasilisa's mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa's new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.

Review: Wildcat (The Caledon Saga #1)

Author: J.P. Harker
Started reading: October 11th 2019
Finished the book: October 27th 2019
Pages: 552
Genres: Historical, Fantasy
Published: September 4th 2016
Source: Physical copy from author
Goodreads score: 4.24
My score:

Synopsis

Rhianwyn of the Caderyn is conflicted about giving up a warrior’s life to become a wife and mother, but her love for her new husband is enough to at least make her consider it. However, with the conquering Gaians moving ever closer to her homeland a peaceful life may no longer be an option, for Rhia or for any of her people. With rival tribes, old suitors, and the dangerous General Lepidus to contend with, Rhia soon finds her new family in unprecedented danger, and her choices now must be about more than just herself...

Wildcat takes place in a fantasy land inspired by Iron Age Britain and follows Rhianwyn's story as she encounters a civilisation unlike any she could imagine, and is constantly forced to learn and adapt through trial after deadly trial.

Review: The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books #2)

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Started reading: June 14th 2019
Finished the book: July 12th 2019
Pages: 522
Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Historical
Published: June 16th 2009
Source: Bought the book
Goodreads score: 3.90
My score:

Synopsis

The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows — my new windows — each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whomever cared to listen…

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martin, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Review: How to Remove a Brain: and Other Bizarre Medical Practices and Procedures

Author: David Haviland
Started reading: May 16th 2019
Finished the book: May 23rd 2019
Pages: 182
Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Medical, Historical
Published: August 10th 2017
Source: Got a digital copy from the author
Goodreads score: 4.00
My score:

Synopsis
•Which condition was treated by trapping a child inside a tree trunk?
•Where is the soul found?
•How long does it take to digest chewing gum?
•What are hiccups for?
•Does organ theft actually happen?
•Is it safe to fly with breast implants?
•Did Christopher Columbus import syphilis to Europe?

Taking in everything from the outrageous (yes, Hitler was addicted to crystal meth) to the eye-watering (such as the renowned surgeon who accidentally cut off his patient’s left testicle) to the downright disgusting (like the "cure" for toothache used by the Egyptians involving dead-mouse paste), this book proves that medical science is not for the faint-hearted, lily-livered or weak-stomached!

Review: Romanov

Author: Nadine Brandes
Started reading: March 23rdh 2019
Finished the book: March 29th 2019
Pages: 352
Genres: Historical, Fiction, Fantasy, Retelling
To be published: May 7th 2019
Source: Netgalley
Goodreads score: 3.93
My score:

Synopsis
Anastasia “Nastya” Romanov was given a single mission: to smuggle an ancient spell into her suitcase on her way to exile in Siberia. It might be her family’s only salvation. But the leader of the Bolshevik army is after them . . . and he’s hunted Romanov before.
Nastya’s only chances of survival are to either release the spell, and deal with the consequences, or enlist help from Zash, the handsome soldier who doesn’t act like the average Bolshevik. Nastya’s never dabbled in magic before, but it doesn’t frighten her as much as her growing attraction for Zash. She likes him. She thinks he might even like her . . .
That is, until she’s on one side of a firing squad . . . and he’s on the other.

Review: The Seven Sisters (The Seven Sisters #1)

Author: Lucinda Riley
Started reading: February 20th 2019
Finished the book: March 3rd 2019
Pages: 626
Genres: Fiction, Historical Romance
Published: May 5th 2015
Source: Borrowed from a friend
Goodreads score: 4.20
My score:

Synopsis
Maia D’Apliese and her five sisters gather together at their childhood home, “Atlantis”—a fabulous, secluded castle situated on the shores of Lake Geneva—having been told that their beloved father, who adopted them all as babies, has died. Each of them is handed a tantalizing clue to her true heritage—a clue which takes Maia across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Once there, she begins to put together the pieces of her story and its beginnings.

Review: The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books #1)

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Started reading: August 7th 2018
Finished the book: August 14th 2018
Pages: 487
Genres: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Published: January 25th 2005
Source: Bought the book
Goodreads score: 4.26
My score:

Synopsis
Barcelona, 1945 - just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

Review: Revenants: The Odyssey Home

Author: Scott Kauffman
Started reading: June 26th 2017
Finished the book: July 2nd 2017
Pages: 306
Genres: Historical, War
Published: December 15th 2015
Source: Got a physical copy from the author
Goodreads score: 3.85
My score:

Synopsis
A grief-stricken candy-striper serving in a VA hospital following her brother's death in Viet Nam struggles to return home an anonymous veteran of the Great War against the skullduggery of a congressman who not only controls the hospital as part of his small-town fiefdom but knows the name of her veteran. A name if revealed would end his political ambitions and his fifty-year marriage. In its retelling of Odysseus' journey, Revenants casts a flickering candle upon the charon toll exacted not only from the families of those who fail to return home but of those who do.

Review: Salt to the Sea

Author: Ruta Sepetys
Started reading: February 7th 2017
Finished the book: February 23rd 2017
Pages: 393
Genres: Historical Fiction, YA
Published: February 2nd 2016
Source: Borrowed from library
Goodreads score: 4.37
My score:

Synopsis:
Winter, 1945. Four teenagers. Four serets.
Each one born on a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted by tragedy, lies... and war.
As thousands of desperate refugees flock the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom.
Yet not all promises can be kept.

My thoughts

At first I was not that excited. The book is a bit of a struggle to get in. The last 100 pages gets you going. Thinking about the fact that this really happened, I feel aweful...

Pros

• Based on a true story: The cruelty and the lost of so many people in the war, is shocking. We've all heard from WWII, and what happened, but we did not hear about the Gustloff and what happened on the Baltic Sea. This was totally new for me and I feel thankful to have learned more about what happened and to be aware of this fact. I always feel that books that are based on a true story, give you more than just the story. You learn what truly happened in a world that we live in.
• There were kind people in the time of war: What is so strong about this book is that it's not the standard "The German are the enemy" book. In this book people from different homelands get connected and try their best to comfort and help eachother while taking care of themselves. I think it's not right to always think the German were the evil people in WWII. There were also the kind people who tried their best to help others and who did not accept what was happening.
• Little cliffhangers each chapter: It makes you want to continue reading. The little cliffhangers at the and of a chapter, make sure you read the next, and the next and the next chapter. That's strong about the book and it felt like this carried me throught at some points.

Cons

• Really slow start: The book had a really slow start for me. I understand that the story needs to build up, you need to get the characters going and give an impression of the world.. But at some point in the book, somewhere in the middle, I felt like; "Whats the point?" "Where is this story taking me?". It felt a bit too slow, not really going somewhere. Around page 250/300 the story really get's to the point where it wants you to be.
• Different POV's: This is not always a con, but in this book it was. You keep switching from character to character. The chapters are only 2/3 pages long, so you "stay" with a character for 2/3 pages and you skip again. Reading about another character, someone else's thoughts, is not the bad thing. It just doesn't really suck you into the story when you have to adapt all the time.

Overall

So.. Always when I see a movie about war, read a book about war, all those innocent people dying.. I feel a bit like this.

Other opinions about this book

"Superlative... Masterfully crafted... A powerful work of historical fiction."

-The Wall Street Journal

"Compelling for both adult and teenage readers."

-New York Times Book Review

"Haunting, heartbreaking, hopeful and altogether gorgeous... One of the best young-adult novels to appear in a very long time."

-Salt Lake Tribune

Memorable quotes from this book

"I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet."

"I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself."

"War is catastrophe. It breaks families in irretrievable pieces. But those who are gone are not necessarily lost."



What's the best book you've read with the topic war?

Review: Outlander (Outlander #1)

Author: Diana Gabaldon
Started reading: January 16th 2017
Finished the book: February 19th 2017
Pages: 896
Short review: Romantic, 1700's, Scotland, fantasy, doesn't feel like a long book
Published: July 26th 2005
Source: Bought the book
Hearts: ❤❤❤❤❤



Characters:
The main character is Claire Randall, who is living with her husband Frank Randall after WWII. By accident she ends up in Schotland in the year 1743. Shocked by what happened she gets to know a bunch of Scottish warriors and among them the young Jamie. Claire slowly builds a life for herself and seems happy. But at some point she has to make a choice between Frank and Jamie.
I truly LOVE Claire. She is my #1 heroine. She is fierce, considerate, full of passion and a very believable main character. Next to Claire you have Jaime, another main character to me. Jaime is a great, strong Scotish guy. He is so stubborn and knows what he wants, I love those aspects about him. The chemistry between Claire and Jaime is great, especially when they fight.
The side characters really provide a nice aspect to the story. It's a very strong set-up and a great tought through set of people.

World-building:
The world-building is the aspect that makes this book great. I'm also very fond of the 1700's. I was able to picture the places very well, even though I've never been to Scotland (cry). The way the scenery is described is so full of life, colours and even smells. I could picture everyting very easily in my head and that's what makes this long book easy to read. One of the better aspects in this book!

Story-line:
I've heard some people say this book is "slow" or has "slow" parts, but not for me. It really felt like a quick book, even though I've been reading it for over a month. I was very busy with other books and buddyreads as well, but I could easly read a 150 pages of this book within 2 hours. I always felt excited to read this book. The storyline never gets dull, there is always something that keeps the story interesting, but it won't rush you out of this book. At some point Claires life is calm and without too much thrills, but the way the story is build, it's still interesting without all the action and tension.

Plot-twists:
The story has some plot twists and some situations where I couldn't see an way out. The plot twists are exactly enough to my taste. This book is not build on the plot twists and I like that! It sometimes felt like some of the important characters could easily die in this book, so that keeps you on edge.

So:
If you like the 1700's and are interested in the Middle Ages this is a book for you. It felt like a quick read to me and the world building is the best aspect of this book. I recommend this book if you like historical books with a touch of romance.

Goodreads Review:
Review Outlander