I received this book in exchange for an honest review. This in no ways changes my opinion and all the words below are my own. My review is based on an advanced copy of the book and may not fully reflect the finished copy.

The best describing word I can use for this book is “confusing". Not just because of the historical inaccuracies (hoping an editor for the final copy has heard of Pearl Harbour and fixes that little blip about America not being part of the war in ‘43??).


Right from the get go this book was set up as a story being told by an old lady about something that happened to her as a child during WW2. However, the narration is all over the place. Sometimes it seemingly is in third person even though the book is supposed to be in first person, and often the storyteller knows details of things they were not present for and should not know. Even if the storyteller got details from other characters at some point, which the story does not really leave room for, she knows their thoughts which generally makes no sense for a first person perspective when the person was actually in the story. In the very end of the book I was sort of glad that it was a past story being told from a present perspective, but also they could have just had an epilogue and it would have done the same thing with less confusion.


With all of that aside, and about 200 pages of getting used to it, the story is still interesting. I love reading books set in this era, which might make me a bit harsher in reviewing them since I’ve read so many. Either way this plot was shaped as a basic group of misfits deceive someone important but the actual details were completely unique. It was a very different perspective of Nazi territory during the Second World War. I liked that the characters all had depth, and variety but connected to one another with ease. The characters were the real strong point of the whole story for me. Most WW2 era books focus on German citizens near Hitler, people in camps, or people smuggling Jews. While this book touched on all of those it primarily focussed on a different group of citizens that I am carefully trying not to spoil details about.


Overall, I was a bit too confused while reading this book to really enjoy it, but I was still able to finish it and liked the characters well enough. I have hope that the final copy will touch some things up, and on the assumption that it will, I would recommend this to people who want to read more historical fiction without being stifled by an onslaught of historical facts. It's still just a book about a group of people committing a crime together that happens to be set in WW2.