Bogormen

Title: The Complete Maus (Maus 1-2)
Author: Art Spiegelman
Genre: Graphic memoir, WW2
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 283
Date read: October, 2022

Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust”.

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.


I know this is considered a classic and one of the best graphic memoirs out there, but I don't know... to me it just fell flat. Both fascinating and heartbreaking to be sure, but I'm not entirely sure I understand neither how it became so acclaimed (other than, perhaps, by virtue of being one of the first of its kind?) nor why it's been banned in so many states. Google tells me it's because of violence... well, duh? It's a book about the Holocaust - how could it NOT be violent???

I'm glad I have read it. But I'm equally glad I got it out of the library rather than buying it for myself.

Title: The Orchid House
Author: Lucinda Riley
Genre: WW2
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 523
Date read: October 2014

As a child Julia Forrester spent many idyllic hours in the hothouse of Wharton Park estate, where her grandfather tended the exotic flowers. So when a family tragedy strikes, Julia returns to the tranquility of Wharton Park and its hothouse. Recently inherited by charismatic Kit Crawford, the estate is undergoing renovation. This leads to the discovery of an old diary, prompting the pair to seek out Julia's grandmother to learn the truth behind a love affair that almost destroyed Wharton Park. Julia is taken back to the 1940s where the fortunes of young couple Olivia and Harry Crawford will have terrible consequences on generations to come. For as war breaks out Olivia and Harry are cruelly separated


A must-read for anybody who enjoys intriguing family secrets. I was very pleasantly surprised by it, and quickly swept up into the events of the book. I really came to care about the characters and was interested in what would happen next.

I read this in translation which usually isn't my first choice, but I almost forgot it was a translation! The language flowed beautifully, and I never mentally translated it back into English, which is otherwise often the case.

Riley did throw one loop at the reader that I think she would have been better off just leaving alone. It had no real purpose and seemed forced.

So because of that, I've subtracted a single star. But 4 still remains because of the general delightfulness of the book :)

Title: Rose Under Fire
Author: Elizabeth Wein
Genre: World War II
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: 368, Audiobook ~12hrs
Date read: June 2013, April 2021

While flying an Allied fighter plane from Paris to England, American ATA pilot and amateur poet, Rose Justice, is captured by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp. Trapped in horrific circumstances, Rose finds hope in the impossible through the loyalty, bravery and friendship of her fellow prisoners. But will that be enough to endure the fate that’s in store for her?


... And here I thought "Code Name Verity" packed a punch...

Rose Under Fire is an extremely poignant and important book. I literally sat stunned for a couple of minutes after finishing it (be sure to read the author's afterword!). The horror of RUF is that this is all REAL! Oh sure, there never was a person like Rose Justice - the American who got mistaken for a French political prisoner and thus sent to Ravensbrück... but Ravensbrück itself is real... the war crimes committed against the "rabbits" were real. And that's what makes this book such a devastating read. Rose made the horrors of the concentration camps become real in a way few other books have managed to, because she is such a relate-able heroine, and the shock of going from discounting the rumours of medical experiments in concentration camps as "anti-German propaganda" to seeing for herself the results of those experiments is only all too believable.

The novel is interspersed with Rose's poetry - some of which is too heartbreaking for words.

Title: Pigen fra Auschwitz (The Girl From Auschwitz)
Author: Morten Vestergaard
Genre: Non-fiction, WW2
Rating: 5/5
# pages: 205
Date read: March, 2012

Arlette Levy Andersen lived in the concentration camps Birkenau and Auschwitz for more than a year near the end of World War 2. For four decades Arlette didn't even tell her own Jewish family what she experienced there.

In "The Girl From Auschwitz" Arlette finally opens the doors to the horrible experiences because she feels obliged to do so. "Soon nobody will be left to tell about what happened," is her way of expressing it. Arlette tells about her childhood in Paris, being arrested at her university, being deported in stock cars and the stay in the concentration camps. About surviving. About staying quiet and keeping her memories to herself. And about the love that took her to Denmark after the war, where she got married and made a new life for herself.


One of the most moving books I've read about concentration camps and WW2. I couldn't not read it in one sitting, and put it down with a heavy sigh and tears in my eyes.

What makes this book so powerful is that Arlette's story isn't unique. She is merely one of 1,3 million prisoner's of Auschwitz, but unlike 1,1 million others, she got out of there alive.

I'll never understand the Holocaust (nor do I really want to, actually!). Killing people in active war is one thing, but slaughtering people like that, in cold blood, is quite another. How could the soldiers make themselves do it? How could they live with themselves afterwards? I guess they must somehow have convinced themselves that they weren't proper humans, and that killing them was no worse than killing animals... at least, that's the only explanation I can find.

I'm glad Arlette decided to speak out, and agreed to have this book written. Granted, it didn't tell me anything about Auschwitz that I didn't already know, but hearing it from somebody who experienced the terrors herself and survived makes for a very powerful story.

Unfortunately "The Girl From Auschwitz" hasn't been translated to other languages.

Title: Sarah's Key
Author: Tatiana de Rosnay
Genre: ww2
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: Audiobook ~11 hours
Date read: May, 2010

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Unfortunately I didn't care much for the narrator (I don't remember her name, but as she was a Danish narrator, that won't really matter to most of you anyway ;) ) as her voice was very, very monotonous. Thankfully the plot more than made up for it!

World War 2 stories have always fascinated me, as they show so much about human nature. This one was especially interesting, as it brought home to me rather forcefully how difficult life was for Jews in other European countries - not just Germany and Poland. I tend to think that most were treated like Danish Jews, and keep forgetting that that's not the case.

Sarah's Key wasn't as devastating as I'd expected, but it was still a heartbreaking story. I liked the way it was written - with parallels to present-day France - as that gave a very nice perspective to the story. But some of the attitudes depicted in the book frustrated and infuriated me - just because it's been 60 years doesn't mean we should forget all about the Holocaust.

Great book, even if it did end up being very different from what I had expected.

Title: Reunion
Author: Fred Uhlman
Genre: WW2
Rating: 2/5
# pages: 100
Date read: June, 2009

1932 Germany: Middle-class, Jewish Hans forms an intense friendship with Konradin, a young aristocrat. A year later it is over. Reunion is a look at both the nature of friendship and the effect of Hitler’s rise to power on ordinary lives.

I sometimes get the feeling that books about World War II ought to be highly rated simply because they're about WW2, and therefore I feel guilty when I can't in good conscience do that. I don't know why that is.

Anyway, this is one of those books where I can't rate it much higher than I did. I don't know what I expected of the book, but this wasn't it. At only 100 pages it's more of a novella than a novel, and because of the Danish translation of the title (Iron Gate) I had assumed that it took place in a concentration camp, rather than - as the case is - in a fairly upper-class school in Stuttgart, Germany. I know that's my fault and I can't blame the book for my misconceptions, but it still affected the way I viewed it.

That aside, the book was reasonably interesting, but neither emotionally nor intellectually engaging, with the exception of the very final paragraph. The end was thrilling, and for once I didn't mind the climax being left unexplained - it seemed to fit the rest of the novella. Still, it seemed more like it ought to be a couple of chapters in a much longer book, than a book in its own right.

Book List

Title: Højtlæseren (The Reader)
Author: Bernhard Schlink
Genre: World War 2
Rating: 8/10
# pages: 164
Date read: March, 2009

Summary: When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover...then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Review: Recommended to me by irinaauthor
What I most liked about this book was the writing style, which actually came as a huge surprise to me, because usually I'd find that way of narrating (telling everything from a distance, very little dialogue, hardly any characterisation at all) boring, but it worked very well to maintain the almost unreal atmosphere of the book, and had me wonder on several occasions if this might actually be a memoir, rather than a work of fiction.

I can't decide whether or not I agree with Michael's actions and reasoning. I probably would have acted differently, but that may just as well be me who's wrong and he who's right as the other way around. For the same reason I can't really figure out whether or not I liked the book. I was fascinated by it, and completely mesmerised by the narrative, and yet I felt like I was watching the events from afar, and never felt drawn to the characters.

I have a hard time picturing how this novella could suitably be turned into a movie, but if it's done well, I don't wonder at all that it was nominated for an Oscar.

Book List

Title: Farthing
Author: Jo Walton
Genre: Alternative history, crime
Rating: 7/10
# pages: 319
Date read: January, 2009

Summary: Over a summers weekend in 1949 -- but not our 1949 -- the upper-crust "Farthing set," the group that overthrew Churchill and negotiated peace with Hitler eight years before, enjoys a country retreat. Lucy is a minor daughter of two politicians in the group; since her marriage to a London Jew, relations have been strained. So she's surprised when she and husband David are invited for the weekend. Then, overnight, a different member of the set is found murdered, with abundant signs that the killing was ritualistic. As the authorities begin to investigate, it becomes clear to Lucy and David that they were invited in order to pin the murder on David. But whoever devised this conspiracy didn't reckon on the man from Scotland Yard being someone with his own private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts and looking beyond the obvious. As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out -- a way fraught with peril in a darkening world. More than an alternate-history story, more than a drawing-room mystery, Farthing is a compelling story of encroaching darkness and the people who ultimately decide to resist it.

Review: I really enjoyed the writing style of this novel, with every other chapter being told by Lucy Kahn in first person and every other chapter told from the view point of Inspector Carmichael in third person. Jo Walton did an excellent job of keeping the two different styles distinct, and letting us see the plot unfold from each viewpoint.

But while I enjoyed the writing style, I'm not too sure about the plot. I've never been big on whodunit, but this had the distinct advantage of giving the reader all the same pieces of information as the inspector had, so I was able to puzzle out the clues at the same time as he was. The ending was greatly disappointing, not from a literary point of view but from a personal point of view. I didn't like that it had to end that way, but I can see how it would be necessary to keep true to the book's universe... where might makes right, and prejudices run abundant.

All in all a very interesting social realistic novel set in an alternative history. I'm glad to have read it... but not sure I'd be going out of my way to get hold of more of Walton's books.

Book List

Title: The Hiding Place Author: Corrie ten Boom Genre: Christian non-fiction, ww2 Rating: 9/10 # pages: 214 Date read: March, 2008

Summary: In World War II, Corrie ten Boom and her family risked their lives to help Jews escape the Nazis, and their reward was a trip to Hitler's concentration camps. But she survived and was released--as a result of a clerical error--and now shares the story of how faith triumphs over evil. The Hiding Place tells the riveting story of how a middle-aged Dutch watchmaker became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's death camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the twentieth century.

Review: A difficult, but important book to read. I pray that I may never have to go through the hardships Corrie experienced, but that if I do, God will grant me the strength to show the same grace as she and Betsie did. We tend to forget that God didn't stop practising miracles after the time the Bible was written.

Book List

Title: The Ship of Brides Author: Jojo Moyes Genre: world war ii Rating: 9/10 # pages: 357 Date read: August, 2007

Summary: A fictional account of an actual voyage from Australia to England in 1946 by HMS Victorious, a WW2 aircraft carrier. On this, its last voyage before decommissioning, the role of the Victorious could not have been more different to its one in the war. It was a transport ship for some of the last Australian war brides to leave Australia, young women who had married British servicemen serving in Australia during the war, taking them to their husbands and new homes in the UK. The story is woven around four young women from vastly different backgrounds who are brought together through having to share a cabin for the journey.

Review: I've always been fascinated about the different aspects of World War II and the effect it had on the world. This is a different book than most as it concerns life after the war rather than during it. In style - although in no way in plot - it reminded me quite a bit of "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute. It's an interesting insight into a social phenomenon we would otherwise not hear about, unless our grandmothers happened to be one of those war brides. I highly recommend it.

Book List