Day: February 3, 2021

As I have mentioned several times here, I enjoy reading historical fiction because I can almost always find a new perspective on a known event. That is certainly the case here.

Much has been written about the resistance in places like France, but this unique story is set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and details how one woman finds strength she didn’t know she had to survive.

I thought that Magda was an interesting character. She had let her birthmark essentially define her throughout her life and could never see what others saw in her. This made for some sad events that I think she actually took the wrong way, and if she had reacted differently there would have been different outcomes.

I also thought that the concept of finding a new home with other “misfits” (at least they were misfits in Nazi eyes) was a good one. I enjoyed the chapters regarding her life with the Taubers the most.

Her relationship with Walter was also a telling point. After all is said and done, he makes a comment about how she could have been kinder to him and he might have been a different person.

On the surface, it sounds unfair to blame her for what he became. But he made a good point in that she didn’t often think of others in that way, always expecting them to throw her away, so she did it first.

I did get a Rolf/”Sound of Music” feel from Walter’s part in the story.

There were some parts that seemed rather abrupt- for example, the fate of Jana, Eva, and Father Gabriel. To me, that came a little bit out of nowhere. It was certainly a jolt of realization about how ruthless the Nazis could be.

I also thought that the end got muddled a little bit. I don’t want to give away Magda’s development and trajectory, but it seemed like there was a lack of focus in the last third of the book.

I also was disappointed in the way many characters came and went with only a quick mention as to their fate (like the Taubers).

I understand why the author wrote things they way she did, because it was a stark illustration as to how life in war-time would be: a person may never know the fate of others and would have to rely on reports that might be no better than hearsay.

Still, I think some of them deserved a better wrap-up than what they got. And I’m not sure that the ending was entirely plausible.

But I still very much enjoyed this book and read it in two sittings (which is a major feat for me these days). I would definitely recommend it.

Author Bio:

Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger was born in Minnesota in 1969 and grew up in the culture-rich neighborhood of “Nordeast” Minneapolis. She started her writing career with short stories, travel narratives, worked as a journalist and then as a managing editor for a magazine publisher before jumping the editor’s desk and pursuing her dreams of writing and traveling. In 2000, she moved to western Austria and established her own communications training company. She has won several awards for her short stories and novels and now primarily writes historical fiction. During a trip into northern Italy over the Reschen Pass, she stood on the edge of Reschen Lake and desperately wanted to understand how a 15th-century church tower ended up sticking out of the water. What stories were lying beneath? Some eight years later, she launched the “Reschen Valley” series with five books and a novella releasing between 2018 and 2021, in parallel to her WW2 novels and short story collections.