CBR17 Book 58: "The Listeners" by Maggie Stiefvater

Page count: 416 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR17 Bingo: Culture (A lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds, countries and cultures are forced together for a time during World War II)

Official plot summary:

January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles.

Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff—many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines—to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.

Meanwhile, FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats’ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweetwater beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.

June has never met a guest she couldn’t delight, but the diplomats are different. Without firing a single shot, they have brought the war directly to her. As clashing loyalties crack the Avallon’s polished veneer, June must calculate the true cost of luxury.

I've been a fan of Maggie Stiefvater's since 2010, when I read her debut novel, Lament. So I was obviously very excited when I heard this year's release was going to be for adults. That it was going to be a historical fiction novel with elements of magical realism just made me more eager to read it. So much so that I pre-ordered the UK edition in hardback (normally, I wait until the books are in paperback before I pick them up). As an exciting bonus, I realised my book was signed when I opened the book from Blackwell's. Did the book live up to my expectations? Very much so.

In Europe, unsurprisingly, we learn a lot about the Second World War in school (especially in Norway, where we were occupied by the Germans for nearly five years). I developed an interest in history from a fairly young age, and as such, I feel like I know quite a bit about the conflict from the European side of things. For other parts of the world, I am a lot more ignorant. This novel is in part based on true events, they did in fact house diplomats from the axis countries (Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia) in luxury hotels in various places in the USA, to be able to use these esteemed guests (read: hostages) to negotiate the safe return of diplomats and American citizens of their own from the opposing countries. And the owners of said hotels had very little say in whether or not they wanted the guests there in the first place. 

One of Stiefvater's strengths as a writer, in my opinion, is her way of crafting interesting stories in worlds similar to, but not quite like, our own. In this book, the paranormal aspects (such as characters being able to manifest stuff from out of their dreams) are toned down, but there is a touch of magical realism in the strange, seemingly sentient sweetwater at the Avallon spa. Water that has an affinity for certain individuals, the Avallon manager, June, being one of them. This clearly has both its benefits and disadvantages for her. 

One might think that a woman being the general manager of a large luxury resort in the 1940s is one of the more fantastical elements of this story, but June Porter Hudson is based on real women in history who held the same position as her. A lot of people assume that because of her title and responsibilities, June is related to the Gilfoyles, who own the hotel. They are wrong, although June has been close, in different ways, to many of the family members. 

As well as June, the readers follow (among others) the secretive FBI Agent Tucker Minick, who knows that this posting may be his last, yet still struggles to toe the line of the bureau. While he refuses to talk about it, he has more knowledge of the secrets of the West Virginian sweetwater than he lets on, and his experiences are clearly not of the positive kind. 

We also meet the curious Hannelore, daughter of German diplomats, who appears to be mute, but astutely observes everything around her, with near-perfect recall. While children in novels can often end up feeling like nothing more than plot moppets, that is not the case with Hannelore, who is clearly neurodivergent (which makes it a rather risky proposition for her parents to take her with them to Nazi Germany, where diversity of any kind wasn't exactly encouraged or rewarded). 

I'm once again reviewing books I read months ago (thanks to my inability to keep up with any other reviews than for my ARCs, and only barely those), so I don't remember all the details as much as I'd like. Suffice it to say, this was a really good book, with an interesting story, engaging characters, some tricksy mysteries and, as the story progresses, a hint of romance. 

Judging a book by its cover: I much prefer the UK cover to the American one (a black and white photo looking down a long, winding staircase). In this, the reader gets a lot more elements from the story: the imposing Appalachian mountains in the background, the majestic hotel, the local apples, obviously the water, and if you look very closely at the entrance to the hotel, June's three loyal dachshunds. 

Crossposted by Cannonball Read

#CBR5 Book 72. "Rose Under Fire" by Elizabeth Wein

Page count. 480 pages
Rating: 5 stars

This book is a companion novel to Elisabeth Wein's Code Name Verity. You don't need to have read that book to understand this one, but you should anyway, because it's one of the best books I've read in years. And you like good books, don't you?

Rose Justice is a young American woman, working for the ATA in Britain during World War II. She made friends among the other ATA pilots, she's dating a young soldier, and she writes poetry in her spare time. Her job is to taxi planes to various locations, and is on an out of the ordinary mission to France, when her plane is captured by the Germans, and she is sent to Ravensbrück, the women's concentration camp during the autumn of 1944. As very little news of the camps was actually released during the war, and what little came out was usually so horrifying that people didn't think it could be true, Rose has no idea what she's in for.

As she doesn't speak German, Rose has trouble communicating with the guards or other prisoners. As she was captured in France, she is labelled a French prisoner, even though she's American. Her clothes are taken from her, her hair is savagely shorn off her head. The treatment of the prisoners is dreadful. She's taken to work in the Siemens factory, where the prisoners get better food, and the barracks are not so crowded, but when she realises that the items she's set to make are missile components, she refuses to do any work. She's brutally beaten as punishment, and sent to a different part of the camp once she recovers enough to work. There she meets the group known as the rabbits, young women who've had horrifying and brutal medical experiments performed on them, and who have terrible scars and deformities because of it. Many of the prisoners are former students, and they love Rose's poetry. By reciting poetry she knows from her school days, or creating her own, Rose helps keep her own and the other women's spirits up.

I don't want to go into too much detail about what happens in the book, because anyone vaguely familiar with the sort of treatment prisoners of concentration camps received, will already have an idea, and anyone who doesn't know about these things, needs to read this book asap. To anyone worried, I can say that much of the book is Rose's journal entries AFTER she's back in Paris having escaped from the camp at the end of the war, so while the book is heartbreaking and serious and harrowing, I can reveal that Rose survives her terrible ordeal. Much of the story is her trying to actually process the things that happened to her. The first quarter or so of the book is her life in the UK before she's captured, and the last quarter is set later, during the Nüremberg trials, when Rose has to decide whether she is strong enough to face her tormentors and testify during the post-War tribunals about what she went through.

As was the case with Code Name Verity, this book has beautiful, touching and utterly believable depictions of female friendship. This is an even more difficult book to read, because while the former book was about two women during the war, one a pilot, the other a spy captured by the Gestapo, this book is about a group of women trying to survive against all odds in a German concentration camp. As Wein says in her afterword, while Rose Justice and several of the other women she writes about in the camp are fictional, everything she writes about the treatment of the prisoners, the unbelievable and sickening medical experiments performed on the rabbits, and the situation in Ravensbrück during the final months of the war is all true. She writes the book to educate, inform and pass on the knowledge. While it's one of the worst books I can imagine to read on a plane (as I foolishly did, literally choking back tears and trying desperately to not sob uncontrollably several times during the story), it's a wonderfully written book. It's an important book. It's without a doubt going to show up on my best of the year list.

Disclaimer! I was granted an ARC of this from the Disney Book Group through NetGalley. This has in no way influenced my review.The book is released in the US on September 10th. However, the book is already out in the UK, where I bought my own copy.

#CBR5 Book 47. "Briar Rose" by Jane Yolen

Page count: 245 pages
Rating: 5 stars

Rebecca, or Becca, is the youngest of three sisters, and has always been captivated by her grandmother Gemma's unusual version of Briar Rose, or Sleeping Beauty. Even after her older sisters got sick of hearing it, she would ask her grandmother to tell it. So when her grandmother claims to actually have been Briar Rose on her deathbed, making Becca promise to find out the truth about her family background and the castle she came from, the rest of the family, especially her sisters, are scornful and disbelieving. As Becca starts looking into her grandmother's past, she realises that no one in the family really knew who Gemma was, or where she came from.

Aided by the handsome editor at the independent newspaper where she works, Becca starts looking into her grandmother's past, and the claims that her story of Briar Rose is true. Her quest to find her family's origins take her to first through refugee records in the US, then to Europe, and Poland, and the remains of the concentration camps of the Second World War.

I love me a good fairy tale retelling. This one is more creative and better than most that I've read. Normally these retellings are fantasy, this is not one of those books. Be warned that this is not an easy read, and while this is a fictional account, the remains of the death camp that Rebecca finds in the idyllic village of Chelmno in Poland, and the stories of what went on there, are all too real. The Sleeping Beauty story that Gemma tells is very clearly a loose metaphor for the terrifying atrocities perpetrated there during the war, and it's clear that Becca's grandmother survived against all odds.

Set in a time which will have been more or less contemporary when the book was released in 1992, it's even more of a historical novel now, when the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist Poland is almost a distant memory. It gives us insight into not only the terrifyingly efficient and systematic persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, but also that of the homosexuals, Gypsies, and anyone else who didn't fit into their vision for the Third Reich. Not all the concentration camps were for the Jews, and not all of them were places were death camps. There were also the hard labour camps, where obscene medical experiments were performed on the prisoners. Recent historical research has shown that there were a lot more camps than we previously suspected, and the extermination machinery of the Nazis was a lot more wide-spread and gruesome than anyone could have believed. Books like this are necessary so coming generations can learn about the horror, and so that we never repeat our mistakes.

CBR4 Book 57: "Code Name Verity" by Elizabeth Wein

Page count: 288 pages
Rating: 5 stars
Date begun: May 21st, 2012
Date finished: May 22nd, 2012

In October 1943, a British plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Both the pilot and the passenger are women, and they are best friends. Queenie, code name Verity, a British spy, is captured by the Gestapo, and tortured for information. While she knows she should be strong and defiant, revealing nothing to her captors, she breaks, and hopes to prolong the time before her execution with a Sheherazade-style narrative about herself and Maddie, the pilot who's killed in the crash. She writes her story on beautiful stationary, recipe cards, prescription pads and unused sheet music, hoping to keep the interest of the Gestapo officer in charge, earning herself a day or two longer with each "chapter" of her narrative.

The story of how Queenie (actually a Scottish noblewoman) came to befriend the granddaughter of a Jewish motorcycle salesman, and how Maddie became a successful pilot during the war, while Julia was recruited into espionage, is told interspersed with desperate ramblings about her time imprisoned in an occupied hotel, her feeble hopes of further survival, her self loathing about having cracked under torture, how she knows the other prisoners despise her for being a collaborator. Each new chapter gives further insight both into Maddie and Queenie became unlikely best friends and got involved in the British war effort in their different ways, and the horrible situation that Queenie finds herself in.

About halfway through the book, there is a surprising revelation, and if I wasn't already completely engrossed in the story, this development ensured that I was even more reluctant to put the book down. The chapters in the latter half of the book are much shorter, and I kept reading with bated breath, both to find out the end to Queenie/Verity's and Maddie's story, and what would ultimately befall Queenie? Would she be rescued by the allies, and have to face their condemnation for her treachery? Would she, condemned as a nacht und nebel (shadow and fog) prisoner, be sent off to a concentration camp to have medical experiments performed upon her? Did Maddie actually die in the plane crash, as the Gestapo claimed?

It shouldn't come as a surprise that a book about a young woman, imprisoned and tortured, during the Second World War is heart breaking and unlikely to end with puppies and kittens and sunshine and fun. I haven't cried so much during the latter half of a book since I read The Fault in Our Stars earlier this year, although it has to be said, not all the tears were sad. The book is very cleverly written, with more than one surprise in the narrative, and the two protagonists and their friendship are wonderful. True heroines both, they defy the contemporary gender roles of women, and risk their lives to make a difference.

While the book is not based on actual events, the author confesses that the story is inspired by a number of incredibly brave women who fought for their countries during World War II. This book is an absolute treasure, although the subject matter is obviously not a frivolous one. Because it's written for young adults, most of the references to torture and the true horrors of Queenie's imprisonment are implied rather than graphically described, but it's still quite a harrowing read, so readers who tend to invest heavily in the books they read (like I do), should probably be warned that it's a bit of an emotional roller coaster. You should still read the book, though, because it's awesome. Easily one of the best books I've read this year, possibly several years.

CBR2 Book 68: "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" by Michael Chabon

Publisher: Fourth Estate
Page count: 656 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars
Date begun: July 15th, 2010
Date finished: July 19th, 2010

Josef "Joe" Kavalier arrives in New York in 1939, and meets his cousin Samuel "Sammy" Klayman for the first time. Josef is a Czech refugee, sent to America to escape the Nazis, and all he wants is to make enough money to help the rest of his family escape as well. Sam promises to get Joe a job, and once he realizes what a talented artist his cousin is, he convinces his boss to let them try to create a superhero comic that can rival Superman. Sammy changes his name to Clay, and soon they have created the anti-fascist Escapist, as well as a large number of other popular and extremely lucrative comic book heroes.

Sammy writes the stories, and Joe creates the art for the comic books, but as their creations become more and more successful, it becomes clear that they are being exploited, and get a minuscule share in the profits from their work. Joe saves every penny he can, and spends most of his free time trying to get his family moved from Prague to New York, with very little luck. He falls in love with a lovely bohemian girl, but constantly feels guilty that his family used their last savings to have him sent to America, while they constantly suffer worse and worse conditions under the Nazi occupation. Sammy spends his money on his mother and grandmother, and tries to come to term with his sexual identity.

When it becomes clear that the ship of Jewish children that Joe has spent large amounts of money to help to America has been sunk, he abandons his cousin and his girlfriend to enlist in the navy. During his self-imposed exile, he learns that Rosa and Sammy have gotten married, and even after the war has ended, he stays away from them, until an unexpected event prompts him to try to reconcile with his loved ones.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay explore what is know as "The Golden Age of Comics", and as the wife of a man who is a huge Jack Kirby fan, I knew a little bit about this time period and how the writers and artists usually got horribly exploited by their publishers, making a pittance compared to their counterparts today. While the story is about comic book creators and superhero comics, I do not think you need to know or be interested in such things to enjoy the book. As well as an exploration of the rise of the comic book, and especially superhero comics, as a medium, it is so many other things.

The only bit I wished was shorter, and am not entirely sure what Chabon was trying to do with, is Joe's experiences in Antarctica during the Second World War. Here I thought the story lagged terribly, and while some of it was necessary for Joe's further development, it did not need to take up as big a part of the book as it did.

I had heard many great things about the book, and because of this, my expectations were high. I'm glad to say that the book lived up to my expectations, and that while it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, it is not in any way a difficult or heavy read. All the characters are well rounded and feel real, even minor supporting ones who you wouldn't think made that much of a difference. Both Joe and Sammy are extremely likable protagonists, and for the most part, the book is a joy to read.