Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The book’s jacket copy describes a plot framed by significant historical events, times and locations that have inspired thousands of well-written books. Unfortunately, this book is not one of them. I stopped reading before the midpoint, only browsing the remaining chapters. From the beginning, I felt I was reading a book written for adolescents—more precisely, 12- or 13-year-old girls. Even at that level, the book is amateurish. As a tale of young romance, it seems clichéd and overwrought. Worse, it suffers from poor writing. The book’s most damning flaws, however, lie in its factual errors and historical inauthenticity. Let’s start with the most glaring (and therefore most inexcusable) errors: characters’ names and nicknames. “Alina” and “Tomasz” are, indeed, authentically Polish. However, “Felipe,” “Stani” and “Aleksy” are not. Neither is the unpronounceably spelled surname of a character described as a Polish-American reporter from the U.S: “Adamcwiz.” (And where did “babisu” come from? To my knowledge, no such word exists in any language.) Next, much of the dialogue is amateurishly rendered (even as a “translation” from Polish). Maybe a13-year-old reader would find the fluttering-heart conversations between lovers Alina and Tomasz moving, but I found them tedious and saccharine. There’s more. For example, no idiomatically faithful translation would have Polish peasants repeatedly saying “Okay.” Nor would farmers in 1940s Poland (or elsewhere) discuss food rations in terms of “calories.” The plot itself is, at several pivotal points, highly implausible. For instance, it’s extremely unlikely (for reasons too complicated to explain here) that the aforementioned, implausibly named, American reporter would be reporting on the “Nazi occupation” of Poland from inside occupied Poland. That brings me to the most puzzling (and most irritating) factual failure: the author’s conspicuous use of “Nazi” (noun and adjective) when she should have used “German.” Throughout the book (for reasons I can’t fathom, unless as a misguided but foolish attempt at political correctness) she refers to the invaders as “Nazis,” “soldiers” and, indeed, “invaders.” Never as “Germans.” But no Pole (and few non-Poles) called the invaders and occupiers anything but “Germans” (“Niemcy”). And no Polish farmer, explaining the not-so-distant explosions, would tell his child, “The Nazis are dropping bombs from planes.” He would likely say, “Niemcy zrzucają bomby.”—“The Germans are dropping bombs.” (“Planes” would have been superfluous.) With rare exceptions, even the Germans referred to themselves simply (and correctly) as Germans. (In fact, few German soldiers were members of the Nazi Party.) For those reasons (and others), I give this book one star.