Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Obtained from: Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours
Read: June 10, 2013
The gripping story of Gracianna--a French-Basque girl forced to make impossible decisions after being recruited into the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. Gracianna is inspired by true events in the life of Trini Amador's great-grandmother, Gracianna Lasaga. As an adult, Amador was haunted by the vivid memory of finding a loaded German Luger tucked away in a nightstand while wandering his great-grandmother's home in Southern California. He was only four years old at the time, but the memory remained and he knew he had to explore the story behind the gun. Decades later, Amador would delve into the remarkable odyssey of his Gracianna's past, a road that led him to an incredible surprise. In Gracianna, Amador weaves fact and fiction to tell his great-grandmother's story. Gracianna bravely sets off to Paris in the early 1940s--on her way to America, she hopes--but is soon swept into the escalation of the war and the Nazi occupation of Paris. After chilling life-and-death struggles, she discovers that her missing sister has surfaced as a laborer in Auschwitz. When she finds an opportunity to fight back against the Nazis to try to free her sister, she takes it--even if it means using lethal force. As Amador tells the imagined story of how his great-grandmother risked it all, he delivers richly drawn characters and a heart-wrenching page-turner that readers won't soon forget.
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Speaking as someone whose own grandmother took war time secrets to the grave, I couldn't help but find the basis for this novel intriguing. In reading the book, however, I found myself repeatedly amazed by how effectively Amador managed to portray his characters. The unique familiarity between Amador and his cast - his having grown up with their stories, knowing them inside and out - really comes through the text and gives the book a pleasantly personal feel.
Another thing that surprised me was the depth Amador was able to create between Gracianna and her sister, Constance. Within these pages the author beautifully recreated the intricacies of sisterly affection, a bond so believable that readers never once question Gracianna's mission to save Constance from a death sentence inside a Nazi concentration camp. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this relationship is the center of the entire novel. It had to work and though I can't begin to think how he did so, I feel Amador's efforts on par with those of several more seasoned authors.
On a larger scale, I want to draw attention to how Amador paints the war itself. I'll grant that Gracianna's association with the French Resistance isn't exactly typical, but her personal story, her leaving home to earn passage to America, her believing in that dream and having it literally blown apart by forces outside her control... We have a natural tendency to romanticize the war, to focus of the valiant heroes or the great tragedies, and in so doing forget the average citizen, the people who watched the war through their sitting room windows, who stood witness as the world they knew crumbled under artillery fire. Perhaps it is because Gracianna is someone of average background who was forced to make extraordinary choices, but I think this book really brings home how it might have felt to be that average citizen, the everyday Joe who one day woke up on a battlefield.
A captivating WWII fiction of one woman's tenacity and courage in war torn France.
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Aurrera begiratzen ez duena, atzean dago - Those who don't look forward, stay behind.
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Check out all the stops on Trini Amador's Gracianna Virtual book tour
Monday, August 5
Review at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time
Review & Giveaway at Broken Teepee
Review at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time
Review & Giveaway at Broken Teepee
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