CODE NAME HÉLÈNE by Ariel Lawhon

Among the plethora of recent novels about women working in counterintelligence during wartime (The Lost Girls of Paris, The Book of Lost Names), this one stands out and ranks right up there with Transcription.  Plus this book is about real-life heroine Nancy Wake and proves that historical fiction does not have to be poorly written or trite.  I find that some popular historical fiction authors are good researchers but not necessarily good storytellers.  This novel, however, is gripping and has a juicy love story to boot.  The book follows two timelines that are only a few years apart, and they converge in a very nifty fashion at the end of the novel, with the earlier timeline giving us a broader perspective on characters that we know in the later timeline.  My only beef with this novel is that a wholly fictional character, Marceline, is somewhat overdone as a villain, and I think the author should have stuck to the facts at the end, instead of making Marceline so vicious.  The story opens with a hungover Nancy preparing to parachute into the French countryside to coordinate the retrieval of airlifted weapons and supplies to the Resistance during WWII.  In the earlier timeline she meets Henri Fiocca, the love of her life, and we also follow her progression from journalist to a woman of great strength and courage who risks everything to defeat the Nazis.  The unspeakable acts of cruelty that Nancy witnesses are almost too vivid, but her various hair-raising experiences and narrow escapes make for an edge-of-your-seat read.  I recommend that you not spoil the story by reading about Nancy Wake beforehand.

SKELETONS AT THE FEAST by Chris Bohjalian

Here’s yet another WWII novel, but this one is set near the end of the war.  Germans are fleeing the eastern part of the country in order to escape the Russian army, who are known to torture and murder civilians.  German families have a much better chance of staying alive by moving westward into the hands of the Americans and Brits.  The family whose story dominates this novel consists mainly of a mother, who adored Hitler, and her two children—18-year-old Anna and 10-year-old Theo.  They are also harboring Callum, a Scottish paratrooper and POW who has been working on the family’s farm, in the hopes that he will vouch for him when they reach the troops in the west.  More importantly, he is Anna’s secret lover.  This novel also follows the death march of Cecile, a young Frenchwoman, and the journey of Uri, a young Jewish man who jumps from a cattle car full of Jews bound for Auschwitz.  Uri is definitely the most colorful character, as he joins the family’s trek but conceals his true identity.  He has become a chameleon, confiscating whatever corpse’s uniform will afford him the best opportunity to survive.  This novel moves at a much brisker pace than the journey of its characters, and that’s a big plus, as the storyline never lingers too long over tragedies.  The author emphasizes that the German people were in denial not only about what was happening to the Jews but also about the danger posed by the Russians’ relentless and merciless advancement.  The parallel between their failure to recognize their own peril and Jews who pointlessly packed luggage before boarding a train to a concentration camp is striking.

THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES by Kristin Harmel

Eva and her mother are called to a neighbor’s flat in Paris to watch her children while the neighbor has to deal with a family emergency.  The real emergency, though, is that Jews are being rounded up in the city, and the authorities whisk away Eva’s father to a detention camp.  Eva then uses her artistic skills to forge identity papers that will allow her and her mother to travel to a fictional town in France that is known to harbor Jewish refugees.  As if the Nazis were not a big enough threat, Eva’s mother resists every move Eva makes on their behalf.  She is in denial about the danger and believes that the arrest of her husband is just a mistake.  Eva’s talent for forging documents makes her a valuable asset to the Resistance, especially in helping to smuggle children into Switzerland, but Eva’s mother continues to be a thorn in her side.  This novel is not great literature, but I mostly enjoyed it anyway.  It’s a love story and an adventure story with a villain whose identity the author does a poor job of concealing, although perhaps that was her intention.  The ending is quite predictable as well, but this is the kind of book where I raced to the end without much consideration for the quality of the writing or lack thereof.  Despite the two timelines—the 1940s and 2005—the plot is a cinch to follow.  There is a section describing a code based on the Fibonacci sequence, which I am very familiar with from a math standpoint, but I had to reread this section several times to get a sense for how it was being applied.  Understanding how this code works is not crucial to the plot, however.  What is crucial to understand is that the code is used to document children’s real names, along with their false identities, since many of them may be too young to remember their true identities if they survive the war.

HOUSE ON ENDLESS WATERS by Emuna Elon

Yoel Blum is a well-known Israeli writer who returns to Amsterdam, the city of his birth, to research a novel about his past.  We know that his mother Sonia escaped the Holocaust with her daughter Nettie, and Yoel, who has discovered that Sonia apparently left another child behind.  Some reviewers have called this a family mystery, but the mystery is not so much about what happened, as that seemed obvious to me, but how it happens.  Yoel has prodded his sister for details after his mother’s death, and her explanation fuels Yoel’s imagination in the writing of his novel, although we readers are enlightened only by the text of Yoel’s novel as it progresses.  He rents a small hotel room in the neighborhood where Sonia lived so that he can immerse himself both physically and emotionally in her story.  This book, then, is actually two stories—Sonia’s and Yoel’s—with almost seamless switching between the two.  Sonia’s life deteriorates little by little into a harrowing existence as she endeavors to save her family from a demise that she can hardly believe is coming.   A revelation at the end explains why Yoel’s mother was so secretive about the past, but that was not particularly surprising, either.  What makes this book special is how personal the story feels.  Sonia’s heartbreak as she wrestles with impossible decisions is palpable and so gut-wrenching that I was immensely glad to know from the beginning that she survives.  This book is a true reminder that the experiences of Sonia’s family, grappling with life and death choices regarding the welfare of themselves and their children, were not unique.  I cannot begin to imagine what their lives were like, but this book provides a small window into that horror.

THE LOST GIRLS OF PARIS by Pam Jenoff

The writing and grammar in this book in the first 25 pages was so bad that I wished for a CliffsNotes version.  “Had began”?  “Mired by politics” instead of “mired in politics”?  Then there’s this sentence from page 14:  “But today the responsibility weighed down heavy upon her.”  Really?  How about “weighed her down” or “weighed heavily upon her”?  I became even more depressed when I discovered that the publisher is Park Row Books, an imprint of Harlequin.  I soldiered on through this book anyway and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the plot.  Like The Alice Network, this is about a group of British women participating in undercover activities—this time during WWII in France.  Marie is the recruit we follow most closely.  She speaks excellent French, and this skill lands her some precarious assignments, beyond her main job as a radio transmitter.  A second plot follows Grace, who lives in NYC in 1946, two years after Marie goes undercover, and discovers a suitcase containing a dozen photos of women, one of whom is Marie.  Grace’s story is not realistic, but sometimes I don’t mind a little stretch in the believability department, and that was the case here.  She embarks on a quest to learn the identities and fates of the women in the photographs, armed only with the name of the case’s owner—Eleanor Trigg, who is the third main character in this story.   A couple of characters manage to hide on their persons a grenade and a key, respectively, despite having been imprisoned and tortured, amplifying my aforementioned complaint about believability.  However, if you can ignore the writing and suspend disbelief, you may find yourself turning pages pretty swiftly.

THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman weaves her signature magical realism into this WWII novel without making it seem too frivolous.  In Berlin, Hanni is desperate to get her 12-yer-old daughter Lea to Paris, and the rabbi’s daughter Ettie, who also wants to escape, is willing and able to create a golem—a mythical person formed from clay.  The golem, whom they name Ava, is to be Lea’s protector in her perilous journey.  Hanni must stay behind to take care of her invalid mother, where neither woman is likely to survive the Holocaust.  Lea and Ava arrive at a distant cousin’s home in Paris, where Lea becomes very close to Julien, a boy of about her same age.  The novel follows the paths of Ettie, Lea, Julien, his brother Victor, and Ava, who is not supposed to have a soul but becomes more human the longer she remains on earth.  More importantly, she becomes attached to this world, although it is her duty to become clay again, once Lea is safe.  I particularly enjoyed the first part of this novel, but as the characters became separated, I had trouble keeping up with the farmers, priests, and doctors who helped them stay alive.  Ava waivers only once in her devotion to Lea, and that mistake threatens to cause a rift between the two.  Her character is obviously mystical, and there are herons with exceptional capabilities, but the other characters and the plot are very real and very poignant.  There was one aspect of the ending that I did not quite understand, but Ava’s reluctance to leave our beautiful world was a reminder of how lucky we are to be alive on this magnificent planet.

THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE by Jessica Shattuck

Marianne is a woman of high integrity who expects the same from everyone else in Nazi Germany.  Her husband and Marianne’s longtime friend Connie (a man) are resisters who die in a plot to assassinate Hitler.  Marianne tracks down Benita, Connie’s wife, and their son Martin and brings them to her family’s castle to wait out the aftermath of the war.  Then Ania and her two boys join the household, where Ania brings much-need cooking skills and a practical nature.  Over the course of the next few years, the women grow closer, but Ania and Benita’s secrets that eventually come to light appall the judgmental Marianne, causing rifts that may never be mended.  Benita is beautiful, but we never fully understand, nor does Marianne, what else, if anything, Connie saw in her, because she comes across as shallow.  She is also resentful that Connie died in a plot she was unaware of and didn’t necessarily support.  As for Ania, Marianne would never have taken her in had she known the truth about her past.  The author takes a stab at explaining why Germans were so enthralled with Hitler, particularly before he began systematically exterminating Jews.  As with so many books of this sort, the ending entails a reunion of sorts.  I’ve seen reviews that likened this book to Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, and, although I was not overly impressed by either book, at least the writing here is much better.  The sentences are not so stubby, but the characters don’t really come to life.  Marianne and Benita are one-dimensional.  Ania is a more complicated character, but her role in the novel trails off at the end.

THE RACE FOR PARIS by Meg Waite Clayton

The race in question is the race to report the liberation of Paris at the end of WWII.  Jane, the narrator, writes for the Nashville Banner, and Liv is a talented Associated Press photographer.  Female journalists were generally forbidden from war zones at that time, but Liv is determined to capture shots from the front.  She persuades Jane to join her on this dangerous gambit, and Fletcher, a British military photographer and friend of Liv’s husband, takes them under his wing.  Unfortunately, his protection has its limits, and the girls find themselves in trenches and dodging bullets, while existing on K-rations and chocolate.  Although this sounds like a treacherous adventure, the action does not exactly leap off the page, and neither do the characters.  Liv is an intrepid risk-taker, haunted by rumors of her husband’s infidelity back in the States.  Jane has a thing for Fletcher, but he has eyes only for Liv.  Jane struggles with jealousy but never divulges enough of herself to show us someone for whom Fletcher could forsake Liv or his absent fiancée.  Jane also has a bit of a chip on her shoulder, because she’s never known her father and her mother is a maid.  She should stand even taller than her affluent comrades, given how far she’s come, but instead she seems to defer to Liv on almost every decision about their journey.  She becomes both Liv’s and Fletcher’s confidante while subordinating her own preferences.  Jane respects and admires Liv and Fletcher, but I never had the sense that they reciprocated.

THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE by Diane Ackerman

Amid all the horrors of WWII, heroes and heroines did rise to save as many Jews as they could.  In this case, the Zabinskis—Antonina and Jan—are Warsaw zookeepers who refuse to give up.  Serving as a waystation en route to more permanent refuges, they gladly provide temporary shelter to hundreds of Jews.  They manage to save not just people but also art, animals, and a massive, meticulously compiled insect collection.  The author culls Antonina’s diaries to deliver an in-depth history of the impact of the war on the residents and structures of Warsaw.  The residents include both the human and animal varieties, and both suffer upheaval and countless loss of life.  Almost everyone who lodges in the Zabinskis’ villa at one time or another survives the war, but the animals are not so fortunate.  Ackerman minces no words in her descriptions of the brutalities and senseless killings that Warsaw suffers at the hands of the Germans.  The animals steal the show in this novel, providing both occasional humor as well as heartbreaking poignancy, as the family chooses some unusual species as pets.  On the whole, the book is very readable and historically enlightening but a little distant as far as the humans are concerned.  Even the horrific scene where Antonina believes that her son has been shot is not as moving as I would expect it to be.  In other words, the author recounts events without speculating on the associated emotional responses.  I enjoy reading nonfiction books that read like novels, but this is not one of them.  It reads like history, and I am not a history buff.  That’s not to say that this isn’t a story that needs to be told.  It is, but the telling of it may be more vivid in the movie.

THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST by Daniel Torday

Eli is a teenager who adores his uncle, Poxl West, who is not really a relative but is more of a grandfather figure to Eli.  When Poxl writes a memoir of his experiences during WWII, Eli is miffed that he never receives his signed copy, but still he reads the book several times and uses it as a basis for school assignments.  This novel contains the entire text of Poxl’s memoir, and this book-within-a-book is the real meat of this novel.  Poxl, a Jew, flees Czechoslovakia for the Netherlands as a young man, at the behest of his father, but Poxl’s real impetus is the shock of seeing his mother with her lover.  Virtually the same thing happens in the Netherlands, where he escapes to England after seeing his prostitute girlfriend Francoise with another man.  He occupies himself in London as a civilian rescuer during the blitz but never gives up on his dream to become an RAF pilot.  Except for the twist near the end, which did not seem all that original to me, this novel didn’t really turn me on that much.  The twist does justify the book-within-a-book structure, though, and creates an unfortunate dilemma for Eli, while shedding more light on Poxl than even his own memoir does.  As for the memoir itself, Poxl’s incessant hand-wringing over his abandonment of Francoise becomes tiresome after a while, although I thought his abrupt departure from Czechoslovakia was much more lamentable.  Other characters seem to disappear almost as fast as they are introduced, and the turbulent times are certainly responsible for some of this.  Still, I never established any sort of bond with any of the characters, even though they weren’t despicable or villainous.  I would have liked to have felt more invested in either Eli’s or Poxl’s story.

CROOKED HEART by Lissa Evans

They say that desperate times call for desperate measures, and that adage certainly applies to Vee and her new ward, Noel, a 10-year-old evacuee from the London blitz during WWII.  Noel is an orphan who has shuttled from his godmother Mattie’s home after her death to the home of a couple who are distantly related to Noel and are relieved when they have to pack him off to St. Albans during the bombing.  Vee takes him in, not out of the goodness of her heart, but because the government will pay her a small stipend.  In her defense, Vee’s life has not been exactly a picnic, either.  She has a grown overweight son Donald who lives with her and uses his heart murmur as an excuse not to earn a living.  His cardiac issue, however, keeps him out of the military, and he soon finds that he can use his defect for illegal personal gain.  Ingrate that he is, he does not share the fact of his scam or his profits with Vee.  Vee, too, figures out that she can make a quick buck going door-to-door asking for charitable donations that she will pocket for herself.  Noel becomes her willing accomplice, finally having something to look forward to, making smart choices about which neighborhood to canvass and which charity to impersonate.  In some ways, this story is sort of a twist on Oliver Twist, but what I loved about it is the burgeoning relationship between Vee and Noel, two skeptical misfits, who become partners in petty crime.  They both have a moral compass of sorts, especially Noel, who becomes outraged when a senile woman’s jewelry is stolen, but he fails to see any hypocrisy in the fact that he and Vee have been milking that same woman for gigantic contributions to their fake causes.  Vee and Noel may have “crooked hearts,” but they’re both lovable and funny, not to mention good for each other, during an extremely difficult time.  This novel never wallows in tragedy or sentimentality, but I found it touching in just the right way.

A GOD IN RUINS by Kate Atkinson

The main character may be Teddy Todd, but this is pretty much a family saga, told in no particular order.  The book covers Teddy’s life from start to finish but meanders all over the place as far as the time sequence.  The gimmick of the day at one time was stream of consciousness, but now many novelists seem to shuffle the events in the story into a random order.  Sometimes the author has an obvious purpose in revealing what ultimately happens and then enlightening us later about prior events, but in this case I felt like the popping back and forth was just for the sake of variety.   A large portion of the book is devoted to Teddy’s experiences as a RAF fighter pilot during WWII, and I found those sections to be crammed with too much detail.  The author may have intended those sections to be the heart of the novel, but, frankly, other WWII novels have moved me more than this one did.  Teddy’s life after the war is fairly mundane—marrying his childhood sweetheart and raising a daughter who then abandons her children in order to pursue political causes.  Teddy’s grandchildren then refuse to spend time with their mother after they become adults—sort of like the son in Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle.”  The ending to this novel is the most memorable part, and I reread it several times, just because I was so stunned.  I thought the ending was very similar to another WWII novel that I didn’t really like and that I won’t mention by name, because it would give too much away.  The author is obviously trying to make a point with the ending, and I get it, but I don’t think it’s completely effective.  What exactly was the point of Teddy’s life after the war?  I think he always felt that being a fighter pilot was what he was meant to do, and everything after that was fairly ordinary, in the greater scheme of things.   Maybe raising his grandchildren gave him some feeling of worth later on, but he harbored a lot of guilt for having sent his grandson to live with the boy’s horrible paternal grandparents for a while.  Other than that, Terry’s accomplishments after the war are not remarkable or particularly worth reading about.  I do love Kate Atkinson’s writing style, but it just wasn’t enough for me here.  

THE NIGHTINGALE by Kristin Hannah

Once again, we have a best-selling novel that everyone is raving about, but I don’t understand what all the hubbub is about.  Two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, are coping with the German occupation of France during WWII in very different ways.  Vianne, whose husband is at the front, has only one objective and that is to keep her daughter Sophie safe.  Isabelle, on the other hand, would be a soldier herself if she could, but instead she becomes a key player for the Resistance and bears the code name “Nightingale.”  Both women are strong in their own way but different as night and day.  Impetuous Isabelle jumps into the fray with both feet, fully aware of the dangerous consequences of one wrong move, while naïve Vianne is the one making all the foolish mistakes.  Vianne fails to grasp how dire the situation is, trusting that the Germans will do the right thing.  Ha!  Plus, she believes the worst of Isabelle, who is actually trying to act strategically rather than just cope day-to-day.  On the other hand, starvation is a real threat, and Vianne has to seize the opportunities to survive that come her way.  Certainly, the heart of the story belongs to Isabelle, and her adventures kept me reading.  I get it that Vianne is suffering more, trying to stretch meager rations so that she and Sophie can survive the winters, but the more interesting part of her story has to do with the German officer who billets at her home.  I am certainly not in a position to judge how realistic the plot of this book is, but the uninspired prose detracts mightily from the gravity of the storyline.  David Gillham’s City of Women is a much better treatment of women trying to save lives during WWII.  In fact, I felt that this book was sort of a combination of City of Women and All the Light We Cannot See but not an improvement over either of them.

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure LeBlanc and her father travel by foot from Paris to Saint-Malo, France, to escape Nazi aggression during WWII.  Marie-Laure, however, is blind and must familiarize herself with her new surroundings with the help of an intricate model of the town that her father builds for her.  Werner Pfennig is a German boy, living in an orphanage with his sister Jutta.  Facing a miserable future in the mines, Werner plies his skills as a radio technician into an appointment to a Nazi training school.  Conflicted about the horrific hazing of weaker boys that he witnesses in school, he still is grateful for the opportunity to avoid the same fate as his father’s—death in the mines.  Jutta serves as his conscience, trying to coax him back from the influences of evil, but he knows that the consequences will be dire if he tries to leave his military training.  The author flits forward and backward in time—sometimes years and sometimes just a few months—so that we know that Werner will be trapped in rubble, and Marie-Laure will be alone and frightened—both in Saint-Malo.  Of course, even without this advance knowledge, we can assume that these two characters will converge at some point, and the author entices us to follow them back and forth in time.  I am not fond of this technique of telling the reader what is going to happen and then telling us what has already happened, but this book in particular seems to treat the timeline in a rather haphazard way.  As a reader, I would prefer to be challenged in other ways than in an effort to keep track of where I am in the sequence of events.  Each time the author heads a chapter with a date, I should have made a written note, but what a pain in the you-know-what.  Overall, I liked the book.  Almost all of the characters are kind and courageous, especially the townspeople of Saint-Malo.  One heinous villain is dying of cancer, and we can only hope that he fades away before doing any more real damage.  The author does a stellar job of creating Marie-Laure’s visionless world for us, especially during her loneliest and most desperate hours.

THE SECRET KEEPER by Kate Morton

Laurel, a teenager hidden in her treehouse, witnesses the arrival of a stranger who apparently knows Laurel’s mother, Dorothy.  Dorothy stabs the man to death with a cake knife but gets away with murder with a self-defense plea.  Fast forward about 50 years, and we meet Laurel again, a successful chain-smoking actress, and Dorothy is dying.  Now is the time for Laurel to dig into the story behind the murder without precipitating her mother’s death by asking too many unpleasant questions.  As with The Distant Hours, Morton tells us more than she reveals to Laurel, and I find that aspect of both books a little disconcerting—having knowledge that the protagonist is still trying to uncover.  However, I found this book much more satisfying, because the flashbacks take place during the turbulent times of WWII, without the Gothic overtones of castles and tyrannical masters of the house and so forth.  Here, instead, we look back on Dorothy’s life, questioning her sanity, as she falls in love with Jimmy, a photographer who doesn’t live up to her standards for education and affluence.  Dorothy is no better off, though, as the caretaker and companion of a wealthy old woman, but she certainly aspires to a higher station in life, as exemplified by Vivien, who lives across the street and is married to a successful writer.  The lives of Dorothy, Jimmy, and Vivien become entangled in unpredictable but intriguing ways, with the reader having to continually reevaluate the measure of each character’s reliability, honesty, strength of character, and kindheartedness.  In other words, things are not as they seem.  I enjoyed everything about this book, except perhaps for the constant gratuitous presence of cigarettes.  I had in mind two guesses as to how things would turn out, and actually, both guesses were right, whereas I had thought they would be mutually exclusive.  The title most aptly fits Dorothy, but all of the characters harbor secrets that keep the story in motion and keep the reader absorbed as the characters morph from who we think they are to their true selves.

CITY OF THIEVES by David Benioff

Lev Beniov is a teenager in Leningrad during WWII.  When he and his buds pilfer the effects of a dead German paratrooper, Lev is the only one caught by the authorities.  His sentence is actually a quest:  to find a dozen eggs for a wedding cake for the daughter of a Russian colonel.  Kolya, a soldier caught for desertion, is his assigned partner in this quest and has enough worldly experience to be a little more resourceful than Lev.  The problem is that Russians are starving, and everyone has already eaten their chickens, since they don’t have the means to feed them.  Kolya and Lev follow what leads they have, finding the extreme lengths to which people will go to survive.  After a few hair-raising encounters, they come upon a group of young Russian women who are serving the sexual needs of the occupying German officers.   Well-fed, these girls seem to be a possible avenue to the required eggs.  At this point, Kolya and Lev join forces with a group of partisan soldiers who have weapons and skills, one of whom is a young female sniper, Vika, with whom Lev becomes infatuated.  Since Lev is ostensibly the author’s grandfather, we can assume that he survives.  However, this is fiction, and anything can happen.  In this case, what happens is a series of treacherous adventures, culminating in a life-or-death chess match, in which Lev shows his mettle.  While Lev is awkward and naïve, Kolya is flamboyant and eternally optimistic, with Lev providing the practical influence to Kolya the dreamer and schemer—sort of like a superhero and his sidekick.  Not that I would compare this story to a comic book, because anything about WWII is going to be deadly serious, and this book has several horrific moments.  On the whole, though, it’s a captivating adventure novel that takes place in a true life-and-death setting.

THE LIGHT IN THE RUINS by Chris Bohjalian

It’s Italy near the end of WWII, and not everyone is a Mussolini fan.  In fact, the Nazis are viewed with rabid distaste, even though Italy is aligned with Germany.  A dozen years later, a serial killer, who provides some of the narration, is literally ripping out the hearts of the members of the Rosati family, one by one, seeking revenge for some unknown offense.  Serafina Bettini is a rare entity for the 1950s—a female police officer.  She is investigating the crimes and also has a connection to the Rosatis, because she took refuge among the crypts in the Etruscan ruins on the family property during the war.  From all indications, the cause of the murders dates back to the war, since the Rosatis billeted Nazi officers in their villa, although not exactly with open arms, and the youngest daughter fell in love with a not-so-zealous German lieutenant.  There are plenty of clues as to who might have found the Rosatis’ liaisons with the Germans unpalatable, but the family’s unforgiveable crime is not revealed until the end.  Still, nothing justifies the killer’s cold-blooded obsession with wiping them out.  War makes people do unthinkable things to save themselves, and this book crystallizes all the ambiguity of being Italian during this most horrible of times.  It’s definitely a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation.  Whom should you fear most?  The cruel Nazis with no respect for human life, or your fellow countrymen who may or may not exact just as high a price later?  Plus, sometimes the choice is not about saving your own life but rather about loved ones versus strangers.  In this case, an ironic outcome for the ones who were saved means that the wrong choice was made, but no one could have foreseen that at the time.

MOTHERLAND by Maria Hummel

Like City of Women, this novel takes a look at the lives of Germans during the turmoil of WWII.  Inspired by the experiences of her grandparents, the author turns the tables to paint the Americans swarming into Germany as the bad guys.  This viewpoint is a risky proposition and more than a little unsettling.  Liesl is a young wife with three stepsons, while her husband, a doctor, administers to wounded soldiers at the front.  Liesl has her hands full, as Hans, the oldest son, becomes more and more restless and rebellious, and middle son Ani's declining health could land him in an institution that exterminates unfit children.  As if these two boys don't present enough problems, Liesl has to direct most of her attention to Jurgen, an infant.  Hans takes advantage of Liesl's reluctance to discipline her stepchildren, and Ani's mysterious illness may be self-inflicted.  Liesl becomes frazzled to the breaking point, particularly with the Allies' bombs bursting all around them.  Liesl's husband Frank is the rock of the family, but unfortunately he is absent.  Liesl's heart, rather than her head, drives many of her decisions, and her heart steers her well in some, but not all, situations.  These characters are all so flawed that I became a little annoyed, not to mention highly conflicted about their patriotism.  Ultimately disillusioned with the Third Reich, Liesl cannot even rely on her neighbors and fellow Germans, who sometimes seem bent on thwarting her efforts to keep her family safe.

THE ALL-GIRL FILLING STATION'S LAST REUNION by Fannie Flagg

Sookie has just married off the last of her four daughters, and she's exhausted.  Before she even has a moment to recover, she receives the shock of her life:  she's adopted.  Her 88-year-old mother Lenore, overbearing and over the top, has never mentioned this fact and has always pressed Sookie to live up to her Simmons family heritage.  The novel alternates between Sookie's attempts to adjust to her newfound identity and the history of her biological relatives, a Polish family who owned a gas station in Pulaski, Wisconsin.  Their story is more compelling, as four daughters run the family filling station while their father is in a tuberculosis sanatorium and their brother is a WWII pilot.  Three of the girls, including Sookie's biological mother, become WASPs, a group of female pilots who ferry planes to the troops.  The tone of Sookie's story makes it seem a little frivolous;  Sookie is justifiably upset but copes by meeting a psychiatrist at Waffle House so that her nosy neighbors won't find out.  That plan backfires, but it's absurd, any way you look at it.  The WASPs, however, are a spunky bunch, and this novel is a good vehicle for getting their story told to other women, although I felt that Sookie's silliness detracted from the meatiness of the WASPs' history.

ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS by Ronald H. Balson

I was reluctant to read this book, but several people told me they loved it, so I borrowed a copy and dove in.  I found the storytelling to be decent, but the other facets of the book dragged it down so much that I have to disagree with all those proponents.  The dialog is stilted, and the character development is non-existent.  Catherine is an overworked attorney whose friend Liam, a private investigator, introduces her to Ben, a Polish Holocaust survivor.  Ben is convinced that a prominent Chicago philanthropist is a former Nazi who absconded with his family's treasures, including a sizeable amount of cash.  (I didn't understand why this Jewish family didn't keep a large chunk of their cash for escape purposes; if they were giving their valuables to someone for safekeeping, then surely they suspected that they might have to flee.)  Catherine becomes somewhat of a broken record as she incessantly laments the billable hours that she sacrifices in order to hear Ben's story.  (The lady doth protest too much.)  Eventually, of course, she buys into his story so completely that she's willing to risk everything in order to help him obtain retribution.  I, on the other hand, just did not warm up to him and never felt as moved by Ben's story as Catherine was.  In fact, Ben got on my nerves with his refusal to cut to the chase.  Plus, some of the things he did to help rescue his family back in the 1940s, such as impersonating a Nazi officer, seemed a bit far-fetched.  That episode is not really any more preposterous, though, than the fact that an attorney would spend hours of office time listening to an old man's story.