** Beyond That, The Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

The first part of Beyond That, The Sea takes our heroine, a young British girl, across the Atlantic Ocean as part of a program to protect children from the dangers of WWII. She is lucky enough to be welcome by a prosperous, kind family and discovers the joys of living a completely different life from what she had in London. I loved that first third of the story, as the author delicately shows the difficult transition and emotions that accompany such a tremendous change.

Of course, she has to go back at the end of the war, and that’s where the story fumbles, in my mind. Of course she needs to adjust again, and, being older, she does not necessarily want to. She misses her host family. And of course there is a misguided romance. The story became less and less interesting to me, more contrived, and written as if America is always the best place on earth. Great beginning, though!

* Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea

Good Night, Irene starts well, with a plucky upper middle class woman dumping her batterer of a fiancé to join the Red Cross and eventually run a coffee and donut truck for troops in Europe during WWII. Alas, the author chooses to depict post-D-Day Europe as a land of croissants and cute hotels (admittedly between some seriously grim war scenes), which better matches a typical contemporary French vacation than the reality of food rationing and shortages of just about anything else. And the surprise reunion at the end is simply impossible.

It reminded me of another WWII story that I did not care for despite public acclaim, All the Light We Cannot See, which I disliked for the same reasons.

** The Lock-up by John Banville

The Lock-up takes place in post-WWII Dublin but reaches back to the murky end of WWII and stars a detective and pathologist who investigate an apparent suicide that turns out to be a lot more complicated. I thought that the author did a great job painting the literal and metaphorical atmosphere of the place, but the plot did not cohere properly.

* The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn

There are some excellent scenes and intriguing characters in The Whalebone Theatre, but it could not, for me, save the overall story from déja vu (rich English family on the decline, brave resistance in WWII France) with mostly stock characters in the main roles and large plot holes. For instance, how would children left to themselves understand Shakespeare’s plays? Why would a French resistant hide the heroine for weeks without being found out? The book would have benefitted from a good editor.

* Plunder by Menachem Kaiser

The grandfather of the author of Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure lost his apartment building in Poland during the holocaust–and most of his family. Trying to reclaim the property requires the services of a strange lawyer called “The Killer”, explorations of handwritten property records, and baffling rulings that long-dead relatives are not really considered dead since the Nazis did not care to keep great records, and even if said relatives would now be 120 years old. Of course, that’s not quite enough to fill a book so there are long descriptions of treasure hunters that seek Nazi gold in Silesia, yielding more adventures than gold. There are some heart-breaking moments but the overall effect is that of a travel diary.

** The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont

The Escape Artist is a memoir from a woman who grew up with parents who survived the Holocaust but pretended they were Polish Catholics. Perhaps not surprisingly, her sister develops serious psychiatric symptoms, which are hidden from the outside world. And in the end, estranged from her family, she finds herself brutally left out of her father’s will. Perhaps the strangest part of the story, for me, was that she was so surprised by her exclusion, having published her family’s story against her parents’ desires, and cut off contact with them for years. But families are strange that way: they repel and attract.

** A Game of Birds and Wolves by Simon Parkin

A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II tells an exciting story of well-timed war games that allowed the British navy to create new, successful strategies to overcome the dreaded German U-boats and allow supplies to flow into the UK. Unfortunately, the war games are buried into all kinds of other details and extraneous stories (and longish discussions of naval warfare, whichI found unbearably tedious).

 

** Family Papers by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century tells the story of a large Jewish family from Salonica (now Thessaloniki), which found itself a victim of wars, new borders, and the Holocaust. Along the way various members moved to France, the UK, Brazil, and India, and enough of them kept letters, photographs, and all kinds of other documents, in many languages, that allowed the author to tell their stories. The mix of personal choices and historical events is breathtaking and there are some surprises along the way.

*** A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

Virginia Hall, the heroin of A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, was a spirited, rich, well-educated woman who dreamt of a career in diplomacy. But barred from it by discrimination against women and the disabled (she had been amputated of a leg after a hunting accident), she instead launched a highly dangerous mission to help the French resistance against the Nazi occupants, and indeed the French government that collaborated with them. Under a flimsy cover as a journalist, she organized networks, befriended everyone, and coordinated shipments of money, weapons, and supplies. The author provides abundant documentation from archives and interviews, with the result a lively, even griping story. (It is a little puzzling that she gets the famous poem used to announce D-day slightly wrong,)

Virginia Hall would be treated callously after the war, as perhaps could be expected of smart women at that time. Shame!

** Akin by Emma Donoghue

Through a series of unlikely coincidences, the octogenarian in Akin finds his back-to-his-roots vacation in Nice, France, transformed as he needs to take along a newly-discovered great-nephew who grew up in a poor and violent neighborhood. The relationship between the two is wonderfully captured as the two struggle to understand each other across the divide of age and background.

The trip is not just for fun, but to discover the mysterious activities of the elder’s mother during WWII, and this is where the story was not so enjoyable for me, as it felt over-rehearsed and researched. But I did love the many well-observed moments between the two protagonists.