There are so many ways to like this novel because it has a World-War II story at its base but it is also a contemporary mother-daughter story. In addition, it gives credence to the people on both sides of the Holocaust, by showing the ways how everyone suffered. Above all, it is a very good, expertly structured, and well-told story.

In the story, Anna is the mother and Trudy is the daughter. World War II section of it is Anna’s story. The section that happens years later is Trudy’s story. How strongly Trudy’s story relates to Anna’s story the readers find out at the end of the book.

There are two viewpoints, Anna’s and Trudy’s, and from those, the story is alternately told by going back and forth in time.

Anna’s story begins with her family’s background and her father a Nazi sympathizer, in the town of Weimar in Germany. Anna, however, falls in love with a Jewish doctor and hides him in the attic for several months, until her father finds out about him. Anna is a brave and moral woman who doesn’t succumb to the hate the Nazis injected into Germany. If anything, she tries to help the prisoners kept in a nearby camp, aiding another courageous German baker, Mathilde, from she learns baking.

Later, Anna doesn’t believe in digging up the past and she never defends herself against what others assume. This could be because when she finally ends up in the US after the war, in the town of New Heidelberg, she finds a similar prejudice against her because she was a German during the war.

Trudy, on the other hand, has grown up in the USA and has become a German History professor but she can’t get much out of her mother as to her background. For a university project, she begins to interview people who lived in Germany during the Nazi Era. The answer to the question of ‘Will she be able to find the answers to the questions that have puzzled her all her life?’ and the depth of her mother’s sacrifices are inside the novel.

As to the settings, they are broad both with the time and the places, and the story covers several decades, many people, and relationships. Still, it is so well put together that its vastness didn’t distract me. A lesser writer would probably take a couple of decades and concentrate on those and then turn this story into a series, which would have turned me off.

I am also amazed at the kind of research that seems to have gone into this novel. Only a classy author would spend that much time on one novel, yet tell its story with an economy of words but a very effective language.

Learning to see both sides of things that life presents

Trudy's story

two secondary characters, Anna's father and the Obersturmfuhrer, both typical Nazis, but my dislike has to do with my bias against the Nazis as people. It has nothing to do with the author's masterful depiction of these two characters.

is Jenna Blum whose novels are Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers.

it is a stunning story that creates questions in the minds of its readers. I kept asking myself what I would or could have done had I been in Anna's place.

This is a human story. It was impossible for me not to feel for Anna and for Trudy, too, however for different reasons. Rarely a story can make me feel so close to its characters.

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Created Jul 15, 2018 at 3:55pm • Submit your own review...