The Woman with the Blue Star: a novel by Pam Jenoff. Canada: Park Row Books, 2021. 336 pages. ***** Publication date May 4, 2021.
1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amid the horrors of the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis clear the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the sewers beneath the city. Wet, dirty, no food, and sharing living quarters with another family is hauntingly brought to life by Jenoff.
Ella Stepanek is a rich Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who entertains the occupying Germans. Lonely and scorned by her friends because of her stepmother's activities, Ella walks the streets longing for her fiancé, who has gone off to war.
The two girls become aware of each other when Ella catches a glimpse of Sadie beneath the sewer grate in the street. Aware of the danger for each of them, a friendship forms between the two girls who grow to depend on each other for survival. One misstep and all of them will be shot.
Unlike other World War II fiction books, Jenoff wrote this book during the Pandemic lockdown and captured the feeling of isolation and an uncertain future in her writing. If you have taken a break from Holocaust books, you will want to read this one. Jenoff states that the book was inspired by the true story of a small group of Jews who survived WWII in the sewers of Lviv, Poland. While her book is fictitious, it reads true. I was in the sewer feeling the fear, despair, and horror. I asked myself several times, would I have survived? This book is mesmerizing and engrossing, once started I couldn't stop reading even though I was fearful of how it would end. I recommend it as a Book Club choice with many discussion and research points.
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Pam is the author of The Kommandant's Girl, which was an international bestseller and nominated for a Quill award, as well as The Winter Guest, The Diplomat's Wife, The Ambassador’s Daughter, Almost Home, A Hidden Affair and The Things We Cherished. She also authored a short story in the anthology Grand Central: Original Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and three children.
For more information on Pam Jenoff, click here.
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