491
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #37,500 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★☆☆☆☆
overreaching, amateurish, and exploitative. Good intentions do not suffice.
A novel with didactic pretensions, full of factual errors, cliches, and sentimental pathos. I have read countless accounts, as well as fictions on the subject of the Second World War and its effects on the occupied people. I am old enough to have been myself a part of that moment in European history. This is by far the most irritatingly inept attempt at giving a taste of everyday life or exceptional behavior during that moment among civil society. Worst of all, perhaps, is the exploitation of the subject, always shabbily researched and depicted, for cheap pathos. An example of how even well intentioned attempts may fail grotesquely if rigor isn’t applied to the treatment of such a subject.
