WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES by Georgia Hunter

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It was only because of a teacher, who gave an assignment to research ancestral roots that Georgia Hunter first learned about Radom, Poland and its significance to her grandfather. She didn’t know what happened to her ancestors and how they had become the lucky ones, the ones to survive one of the most horrendous times in our history - the Holocaust. Curious to answer these and other questions, Georgia began interviewing her relatives and took a trip to Radom, Poland.

This is amazing story, based on true events of an entire family during WWII, from right before the war began to right after (1939-1947). Typically, stories about the Holocaust are about individuals or brothers or unrelated people — this is the first book I’m aware of that is about an entire family. The Jewish Kurc family lived in Radom, Poland -  the parents (Nechuma and Sol), two daughters (Halina and Mila) and two sons (Genek and Jacob).  There was a third son (Addy) but he lived in France. 

This heartfelt story is a beautiful one that is well-written, flows well and has characters you will get to know and care about. We Were the Lucky Ones tells what happened to each member of the family and their struggle to survive. We are taken into their experiences and feel their emotions including fear, the love for family, courage, etc. The chapters alternate between the parents and each one of their children. The story spans across the world — Italy, Poland, France, Siberia, Brazil, and Morocco — over six long years. 

The book delves into the beginning of the Holocaust, when it seemed like it wouldn’t spread beyond Germany. We are there with these characters as they confront a changing society in which being Jewish is a defect that slowly morphs into a crime. 

All around her, it seems, Jews were disappearing. And suddenly, the consequences of this war were undeniably real—an understanding that sent Halina spiraling as she wrestled with the knowledge she both feared and loathed: she was powerless.

We witness Bellas’s anguish living with loss and her suffering from PTSD and survivor guilt.

She wanted, badly, to feel herself again. To be a better person, a better wife. To accept what had happened. To move on. But losing her sister, and then her parents—it was crippling. Their deaths gnawed at her in her waking hours, and haunted her in her sleep. Every night, she would see her sister being dragged into the woods, she would see her parents boarding the trains that would deliver them to their deaths. Every night she dreamed of ways she could have helped them.

There will always be reminders, she thinks. There will be days that are not so bad, and others that are unbearable. What matters, she tells herself, is that even on the hardest days, when the grief is so heavy she can barely breathe, she must carry on. She must get up, get dressed, and go to work. She will take each day as it comes. She will keep moving.

Yet at this horrific time, certain celebrations continue, like childbirth and marriage.  A rabbi marries Jacob Kurc to Bella in secret. Unfortunately, such happy moments are few and far between.

There are so many experiences that are so well-drawn that the reader cannot help but feel for these characters and become emotionally invested in their stories. For example, there is the situation in which a spouse thought long dead miraculously returns, resulting in shock and bewilderment. While it is a wonderful outcome, we see that it can be difficult to reconcile, much like cognitive dissonance.

“You must be relieved though, yes?” Mila nods. “Of course.” She lifts her chin, turns to face her mother. “It’s just that—I’ve spent the last six years thinking he was—was dead. I’d adjusted to it. Accepted it, even, as terrible as that sounds. “I shouldn’t have given up on him. I should have been more hopeful. What kind of wife gives up on her husband?” 

We see the lengths that Mila has to go to hide her little girl Felicia from the Gestapo.  After the war, Felicia is 7 and since she was 1 all she has known is a world filled with the worst kind of prejudice and racism imagineable. The reader sympathizes with the little girl’s plight and the pain and suffering it has caused her parents.

“I want Felicia to grow up someplace she can feel safe, where she can feel—normal.” Mila frowns, wondering what the concept of “normal” even means to her young daughter. The only life Felicia knows is one of being hunted. Forced into hiding. Sneaked through ghetto gates. Left in the hands of strangers. She is nearly seven, and all but the first year of her life has been spent in war, with the sickening awareness that there are people who wish her dead just by virtue of her birth.

Most of the family members had no idea what happened to the others during the war. Of course, they hoped the others survived but they had no way of knowing.

Nechuma can hardly bear to consider the fates of her children who are missing. There is nothing worse, not even the daily hell of the ghetto, than for a mother to live with such fear and uncertainty about the fates of her children. As the weeks and months and years tick by, the torment inside her builds and burns, a crescendo of misery threatening to crack her open. She’s begun to wonder how much longer she can bear the pain.

There are so many other remarkable experiences in this book about each character’s life, for example, how one son and his wife end up in Siberia, how another son has to hide his circumcision, escaping a heavily guarded ghetto, helping the resistance and forging documents, and so much more. We Were The Lucky Ones is a momentous story that attests to the love of family and the perseverance to survive at any cost. 

NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney

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Normal People is a story about coming of age, search for self and understanding the world and one’s place in it. It’s about two misfits striving to be normal.

He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.

It’s a story about two self-absorbed Millennials, Marianne and Connell, who are having a on and off again and on and off again relationship. I found that I didn’t care whether their relationship worked or not. In fact, I didn’t care about either one of them and that is primarily why Normal People did not work for me.  The characters were two-dimensional, not likable but more importantly, not compelling. Then there was the lack of a plot because there really doesn’t seem to be one, which is probably why I wasn’t able to become invested in the story.

I was perplexed by the lack of quotation marks and found it difficult at times to discern what was dialogue and what was not. I thought long and hard about the absence of quotation marks. Was it to symbolize the insignificance of the words that were spoken? I think both Marianne and Connell would agree.

Both of our protagonists are deeply flawed and these deficiencies feed into each other. Perhaps they think that together they might be more than the sum of their parts but that just never happened. Poor communication is at the heart of their relationship and both feel unworthy and are somewhat paralyzed by low self-esteem. Both seem to suffer from feelings of depersonalization and dissociation.

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.

Lately he’s consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.

Both Marianne and Connell tend to be fatalistic and believe the worst of themselves. Feelings of inferiority haunt them and self-castigation abounds.

In just a few weeks’ time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There’s nowhere she can go that would free her from this. A different place, different people, what does that matter?

Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises.

Connell in particular feels socially awkward and alienated, unsure of how to think and feel.

Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.

They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.

I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school.

Marianne on the other hand despises herself and believes this hatred is well deserved.

Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of… I have a coldness about me, I’m difficult to like.

Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person.

I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.

Were Marianne and Connell ever really in love? While they proclaim their love for each other, I did not get the sense that they were in love. What drew them to each other? Could it be that opposites attract?  Sometimes they saw traits in each other that they wished they possessed.

Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him. 

When the book begins they are in High School where Marianne is an outcast and doesn’t care what others think of her whereas Connell is popular and concerned with fitting in with his friends. But when they go off to Trinity College, their roles are completely reversed — Marianne becomes the popular one and Connell is the outcast. Having each been in the other’s shoes so to speak, one would think there would be natural empathy for one another but i didn’t see where that happened.

Yet In spite of themselves, they each actually become somewhat of a positive catalyst for the other’s life. That is probably the most surprising and appealing aspect of this book — how one person can significantly influence another’s life and shape it for the better. And as far as being normal, perhaps it is more about growing up, maturing and finding one’s place in the world.

What they had together was normal, a good relationship. The life they were living was the right life.

Marianne is neither admired nor reviled anymore. People have forgotten about her. She’s a normal person now.

THE OTHER MRS. by Mary Kubica

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How well we think we know those closest to us. And then, what a shock to the system it is to find out we don’t know them at all.

This is the first book I’ve read by Mary Kubica and it definitely won’t be my last! This was a twisty roller coaster ride that gave new meaning to the term gaslighting (for those unfamiliar with it, from dictionary.com — to cause a person to doubt his or her own sanity through the use of psychological manipulation). I was on the edge of my seat reading The Other Mrs. and couldn’t flip the pages fast enough. 

After Will’s sister dies, his family (wife Sadie and two young boys) move to a remote Maine island to live in her house and care for Imogen, the daughter she left behind. The only problem is that Imogen hates them. For Sadie, Will and the boys, a move to a new place means a fresh start and that is a welcome change, after Will’s affair and one son’s trouble at school. Shortly after their arrival, a neighbor is killed and Sadie becomes a suspect.

Sadie blames herself for Will having an affair. She knows she tends to be cold and feels her profession as a doctor is partly responsible since emotion has no place in medicine.

There’s a small part of me that blamed myself for the affair. That believed I’d been the one to push Will into the arms of another woman, because of who I am. I blamed my career, which requires that I be detached. That detachment, the absence of an emotional involvement, works its way into our marriage at times. Intimacy and vulnerability aren’t my strong suit, nor have they ever been. Will thought he could change me. Turns out he was wrong.

I can be cold, I know. Glacial even. I’ve been told this before. I often think that I’d been the one to push Will into the arms of another woman. If only I had been more affectionate, more sensitive, more vulnerable. More happy.

The story is told from three points of view -  Sadie - is married to Will and, Camille - is in love with Will but is obsessed to the point of stalking him, and Mouse - a 6 year old child who struggles with her “Fake Mom.”

Camille tries to evoke sympathy from the reader for being the “other woman.” She conveys how lonely and difficult it can be.  This is not exactly what one expects to hear from the “other woman,” even if it’s true. One doesn’t often hear this perspective.

It’s not easy being the other woman. The only thing there is for us is disdain, never sympathy. No one feels sorry for us. Instead they judge. We’re written off as selfish, scheming, shrewd, when all we’re guilty of is falling in love. People forget we’re human, that we have feelings too.

I went on, telling her how hard it was being that other woman. How lonely. How I didn’t have the promise of daily contact. No check-in phone calls, no late night confessions as we drifted to sleep. There was no one to talk to about my feelings. Alone, I tried not to ruminate on it.

Kubica masterfully structured this story and it flows well. Don’t be put off if you don’t understand the other two POVs, especially Mouse’s. It will all come together in the end. I thought I had figured out the mystery but turns out I only got part of it right but that little predictability didn’t detract from my enjoyment because there was a lot more action and twists to the story. It’s impossible to see all the twists coming and Kubica does a great job keeping the reader guessing.

Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing - Park Row and NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest review.

MR. NOBODY by Catherine Steadman

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Emma Lewis is a leader in her field of memory loss and is chosen to work on a case that will challenge her to determine the diagnosis — is it retrograde amnesia, fugue or lying. It will require her to return to her home town, which she and her family changed their names and left 14 years ago. But Emma knows it’s a big opportunity for her career because these cases are so rare.

This perfect offer out of the blue, this opportunity, the chance I’ve been waiting for. But I’d have to go there? Why does it have to be there of all the places in the world? I’ve spent fourteen years of my life trying to get away from that place, what happened there, and now … now I find out that the only way forward, the only way out, is back.

...if I’m honest, it scares me. My face out there connected and connected and connected until it all leads back to that one night. The night when my whole world was shattered and it was easier to just throw the whole thing in the trash than try to fix it.

Both main characters have issues with the past — Emma hides her past whereas Mr. Nobody has no past. He was found on a beach and has no memory of who he is or where he came from. It’s up to Emma to determine whether she can help him to remember.  But she is having problems of her own.

His world shrinks to a pinhead and then dilates so wide, suddenly terrifyingly borderless. He has no edges anymore. Who is he? He has no self. He feels the panic roaring inside him, escalating, his heart tripping faster. His mind frantically searches for something—anything—to grab a hold of, his eyes wildly scanning the landscape around him. But there is no escape from it, the void. He is here and there is no before. There are no answers.

I’ve been so focused on putting those pieces—and you—back together again that somewhere along the way I came apart at the seams.

What a fun ride this was! It had all the elements of a great psychological thriller — suspense, mystery, twists and turns, hard to put down, kept you guessing, etc. I was in the minority with my response to Steadman’s previous work (Something in the Water). It just didn’t float my boat! (LOL). I was hesitant to read another book by Steadman but ultimately decided to take the chance and I am so glad I did. 

Mr. Nobody grabbed me right from the start and kept me turning the pages as fast as possible. The premise was fascinating and the execution did it justice. This is a compelling story that you won’t be able to put down. I thought I had figured some of it out but I was happy to learn I was wrong. Mr. Nobody is a unique story that you won’t feel you’ve read before. The premise is fascinating and the execution does it justice.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine Books and NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest review.