I’m already way, way behind on my reading for the year, yikes.
This month was a little better than March, though — I did manage to squeeze in two books this month.
(As a reminder: I always track my reading both on Goodreads and via Instagram stories.)
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‘THE GERMAN GIRL‘ BY ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA
12-year-old Hannah Rosenthal lived a charmed and privileged life… until 1939. As the streets of her native Berlin see a shift, so too, does Hannah’s family. Hannah and her parents pack up very few of their worldly possessions to board a transatlantic liner offering Jews a safe passage to Cuba for a new start outside Nazi Germany. Several decades later, 12-year-old Anna Rosen is living in New York City and mourning the loss of her father, who died during the September 11 attacks. When Anna receives a package on her birthday from a relative in Cuba, Anna and her mom embark upon a journey to discover their family’s tragic history.
It took me a while to really get into this book, but once I got into it (about 3/4 of the way through) I didn’t want to put it down. I love that this book introduced me to a new-to-me, little-known piece of WWII history. A few criticisms: Both the narrators are 12-year-old girls, but it doesn’t read from an adolescent girl’s perspective. Some of the language got repetitive (I’m not sure why the author kept referring to Nazis as “ogres,” it got annoying) and a lot of the scenes were incredibly drawn out with a lot of useless narrating, but the story itself was at least interesting.
‘THE NIGHT SHIFT‘ BY ALEX FINLAY
New Year’s Eve 1999 turns tragic in the town of Linden, New Jersey, when four teenage girls working the night shift at a Blockbuster are attacked. Only one survives. Police identify a subject who flees, never to be found again. Now, 15 years later in the same town, four teenage girls working the late shift at an ice cream store are attacked… and only one survives. For the town of Linden, the new murder case brings up too many unanswered questions about the past. Can both cases be solved?
I didn’t hate this book! There were way too many characters and a few sub-plots that could have either been removed or written better, but I did not see any of the twists coming, at all. There were a few parts of it that felt a little winding and drawn out but for the most part, it was hard to put down — I definitely stayed up until midnight last night reading it.
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Happy reading!
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