4 Stars. Once again, Ruta Sepetys has found a forgotten corner of history and written a gripping historical fiction novel about it. I’ve read a few books that touch on Germans at the end of WWII fleeing the vengeful Soviet army, but none of them were about Germans evacuating by boat. The history was fascinating and gut-wrenching […]
This train wreck of a year is finally ending and it’s time to post my top ten books of 2020! I revived my book blog in June so I haven’t written reviews for all of these. I’m leaving out books that I re-read and these obviously weren’t all published this year; I simply read them in 2020. Here we go […]
4 Stars. The Fountains of Silence does a wonderful job of presenting the dichotomy of the face that Spain presented to the world and the underlying darkness of the 1950s. Daniel is a wealthy Texas oil baron’s son staying in the American hotel that literally used to be a castle. By starting from his point of view, Sepetys begins with the […]
4.5 Stars. Oh my goodness. How did I not know about this? I’ve come across vague statements about how many millions of people died under Stalin’s regime in the past. I didn’t realize the scale of it, if that makes sense. I somehow thought it was smaller groups of “dissenters” killed across many, many years and across a vast […]