Category: HF Reading Challenge

Book Review: War Girl Ursula (War Girl #1) by Marion Kummerow

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War Girl UrsulaAbout the Book

Berlin 1943: Compassion is a crime.

A prisoner escapes. A guard looks the other way.  Why does Ursula Hermann risk her life and brave the Gestapo to save a man she barely knows?

Ursula has always lived the law, never broken the rules in her life. That is until the day she finds escapee British airman Tom Westlake and all the right she’s worked so hard to maintain goes wrong… He runs. And she does nothing to stop him.

Torn with guilt about what she did, Ursula battles with her decision when suddenly Tom returns, injured and pleading for her help. This is her opportunity to make things right. But shadows from the past tug at her heart, convincing her to risk everything, including her life, in order to protect a man from the nation her country is fighting.

As they brave the perils and dangers of the ever-present Gestapo, will Ursula find a way to keep Tom safe? Or will being on the opposite sides of the war ultimately cost both of them their lives?

Format: ebook, paperback (136 pp.)    Publisher:
Published: 26th July 2017                       Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find War Girl Ursula on Goodreads

My Review

The book’s startling opening scene, once one appreciates the unusual nature of the event taking place, plunges the reader into the atmosphere of wartime Germany.  Frequent Allied bombing raids on Berlin are making the city a dangerous place for its citizens who are also coping with food shortages and the increasingly authoritarian measures of the Nazi government.    ‘During these awful times, death lingered around every corner, and nobody could trust to live to the next day.’  In addition, informers are everywhere.  In the case of Ursula, her sisters Anna and Lotte, and their mother, very close to home indeed.

In Ursula, the author creates a believable picture of someone who has always followed rules unquestioningly and has a strong streak of patriotism.  ‘She prided herself in accepting her fate with grace.  She did what was expected of her.’  However, as events unfold, even Ursula finds herself questioning the harsh measures introduced by Hitler’s government and wondering if the things taking place can be justified, even in time of war.  Working as a prison guard she sees firsthand the awful treatment meted out to those who dare to oppose the government – imprisonment, torture and execution.  ‘Days turned into weeks, and with every personal story Ursula came to know, her faith in the infallibility of the Führer and the Party was hacked away blow by blow.’

When Ursula finally acts as she does it has even greater significance because it is against her natural instincts and involves an agonising moral decision.  As local priest, confidante and ally, Pfarrer Bernau observes, ‘…things aren’t black and white.  Right has become wrong, and wrong has become right.’  However, it turns out that beneath that quiet, respectable exterior, Ursula possesses an inner core of steel.  Isn’t true courage facing up to your worst fears and trying to do the right thing anyway?

Ursula’s story is a timely reminder that there were plenty of Germans who became appalled by the actions of the Nazi government and demonstrated exceptional bravery in trying to help to escape Jews and other people made the focus of the government’s prejudice and hatred.

At the end of the book, the author skilfully sets up the story for the next in the series –War Girl Lotte – with some dramatic news for Ursula, her sister and mother.  War Girl Ursula is a slim novel but it is packed full of period detail and references to actual historical events that makes it feel completely authentic whilst at the same time being a thoroughly entertaining read.  It has two central characters, Tom and Ursula, that this reader found it easy to root for.  I was fascinated to read in the Author’s Notes that some of Marion Kummerow’s own family history also inspired part of the story.

I received a review copy courtesy of the author in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Dramatic, authentic, engaging

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Marion KummerowAbout the Author

Marion Kummerow was born and raised in Germany, before she set out to “discover the world” and lived in various countries. In 1999 she returned to Germany and settled down in Munich where she’s now living with her family. She’s written several non-fiction books about Munich and Germany and published in 2016 her first historical fiction.

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Book Review: Mr Peacock’s Possessions by Lydia Syson

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Mr Peacock's PossessionsAbout the Book

Oceania 1879. A family of settlers from New Zealand are the sole inhabitants of a remote volcanic island.

For two years they have struggled with the harsh reality of trying to make this unforgiving place a paradise they can call their own. At last, a ship appears. The six Pacific Islanders on board have travelled eight hundred miles across the ocean in search of work and new horizons. Hopes are high for all, until a vulnerable boy vanishes. In their search for the lost child, settlers and newcomers together uncover far more than they were looking for. The island’s secrets force them all to question their deepest convictions.

Format: ebook, hardcover (432 pp.)    Publisher: Bonnier Zaffre
Published: 17th May 2018                      Genre: Historical Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Mr Peacock’s Possessions on Goodreads

My Review

Joseph Peacock, the Mr Peacock of the title, is a patriarchal figure, presiding over what he views as his own ‘Garden of Eden.  His wife and family have trailed behind him from island to island, leaving behind a legacy of failed ventures and catastrophes, as he searches for land he can call his own.  ‘Plenty proved not enough for Mr Peacock.  It wasn’t his, you see.’  Arriving on the remote Monday Island (also known as Blackbird Island), not visited by passing ships from one year to the next, they find it is definitely not the Paradise they had been promised.  Cheated by those they had trusted for supplies, for a long time they lead a hand to mouth existence, at near starvation point and relying only on their survival skills and what they can forage from the island.

Ah yes, the island. At times nurturing, at other times sinister and threatening.  ‘In fact, everything here grew a sight too much for Ma’s liking.  It didn’t seem right, all this unearned fecundity.  Flowers that unfurled their perfume unbidden, petals and even leaves so brightly-coloured they seemed brazen.  Vines carelessly floating their seeds any which way and honeyed fruit that flaunted itself, then rotted, reeking, where it softly fell.’   At times, the island almost seems a living being. ‘The air itself feels violent, as though the island is gathering itself for something.  She imagines it breathing, heaving, maybe shifting.’ Furthermore, it turns out the island has hidden dangers and harbours terrible secrets.

I really liked the distinctive, almost poetic, narrative voice the author creates for Kalala, one of the six Pacific Islanders who arrive on the island to work for the Peacocks, and through whose eyes the reader witnesses some of the events.  For example, this description of their voyage to Monday Island.  ‘Esperanza pitch and roll, still in deep water plenty lengths from land, and beyond her monstrous roaring.’

I loved the way the author explored the idea of possession in all its myriad meanings. For example, it becomes clear that Joseph Peacock considers his family, and the Pacific Islanders contracted to work for him, as ‘possessions’ he owns.  However, his most prized possession is the island itself.  Greeting Kalala for the first time as he struggles ashore, Peacock says, ‘Welcome to my island.’ – note the ‘my’ there.  But the islanders too covet the tangible rewards they will receive in return for their work. ‘For have we not come here, we six, we islanders in hope of great possessions.’

Through the course of the book, the reader begins to understand just how crucial it is to Mr Peacock to possess land, not just as something to claim ownership of in the present – although that’s important – but to be able to pass on to his eldest son, Albert. ‘All this work has always been for Albert.  It’s all Pa cared about.  Not him, exactly.  But his name.  Securing the future for the Peacock family, a tiny empire nobody could ever take away because it belonged to no one, where nobody else could give orders.  Peacock land for generations.’

This desire to pass on land, as a testament to everything he has worked for and the obstacles he has overcome, is at the root of Peacock’s troubled relationship with Albert.  Because Albert doesn’t seem to share his father’s burning desire for ownership of land; in fact, Albert hates the island as he hated the voyage there.  For Peacock, Albert is a disappointment, branding him ‘weak’, ‘a shirker’, physically chastising him and viewing him as someone who constantly falls short of his expectations, particularly in comparison with his daughter, Lizzie.

It transpires that the relationship between Peacock and his daughter, Lizzie, is equally complex.   Courageous, strong and adventurous, she shares a similar temperament to her father.  ‘For Lizzie was her father’s daughter, a moth to the flame of new hopes and possibilities.’ For a long time Lizzie is blind to her father’s faults and his true nature, even though the other children see it only too clearly.  Eventually Lizzie finds herself facing an awful choice.  Because she too has ‘possessions’ – her family – she feels bound to protect.

Of course, the term ‘possessed’ may also be used to describe being taken over by strong emotions and, at times, we get glimpses of Joseph Peacock as a man possessed by a sort of  madness.  Here is a portrait of a monster, someone possessed by a desire for control, manipulative and violent.  Before the end of the book the reader will be witness to the disastrous and tragic consequences of his desire for possession and the lengths to which he will go.

Mr Peacock’s Possessions is like the strange but wonderful lovechild of Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies and The Tempest. It will appeal to readers who like their historical fiction full of atmosphere and compelling characters…and an undertone of menace.  Highly recommended.  I can see this novel making some literary prize shortlists.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of publishers, Bonnier Zaffre, and NetGalley in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Atmospheric, compelling, intense

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Lydia SysonAbout the Author

Lydia Syson is a fifth-generation North Londoner who now lives south of the river with her partner and four children. After an early career as a BBC World Service Radio producer, she turned from the spoken to the written word, and developed an enduring obsession with history. Her PhD about poets, explorers and Timbuktu was followed by a biography of Britain’s first fertility guru, Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed, and then two YA novels for Hot Key Books set in the Spanish Civil War (A World Between Us) and World War Two (That Burning Summer). Liberty’s Fire, a passionate tale of the Paris Commune of 1871, is the third of her novels to be inspired, very loosely, by family history: Lydia’s anarchist great-great-grandmother moved in Communard circles in late nineteenth-century London.

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