The manager at the Barnes and Noble where I work had put this ARC aside for me, it will be out in September, and I was picking through my TBR pile and found it. I forgot I had it because I was so wrapped up in my Pride reading and B&N bookclub reads that it got buried. But I started it late in the day Monday and then was so sad when I had to stop and go into work and then yesterday my kids had so much that they needed me to do I didn't get to spend much time with Lea and Ava and Julian but today it was just me, my dog, and this book and I was not going to stop until I was done. And so I am....
Alice Hoffman has managed to do something I wouldn't have thought possible, she made a beautiful fairytale out of the experience of a cast of characters living through the Nazi attempt at exterminating Jews. The backbone of this story is the love Lea's mother has for her and the lengths she was willing to go to to make sure Lea was safe no matter the cost and so we get Ava.
Along the way we meet Julian, Victor, Marianne, Ettie, and others and we are along on a journey of pain, suffering, fear, death, love, life, beauty, and discovering what it means to have a soul, to be alive. This story was so damn beautiful and so very painful, and yet so full of promise and hope. I don't know how she did it but Alice turned this ugly page in history into something more, something unexpected, something life affirming...
(Finished July 10, 2019)
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