Category: Netgalley

Bitmo Sunday book review

Sunday Book Review – Two Necklaces by Paulette Mahurin #historicalfiction #WWII

Published on by dgkaye49 Comments

Welcome to my Sunday Book Review. Today I’m reviewing a book by one of my favorite historical fiction authors, Paulette Mahurin – Two Necklaces. A story of human compassion still existing in a terrible time of war. This book was upcoming on my Amazon reading list, and as serendipity had it, just before I finished reading another book, Paulette was promoting the book on Netgalley, so I grabbed my copy there.

Get This Book on Amazon

Blurb:

“Two Necklaces is a beautiful, compelling story of young love set during the rise of Nazism in Germany that you won’t want to put down.” –Geneviève Montcombroux, author of Racing North

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany, fourteen-year-old Christa Becker begins attending meetings of the League of German Girls, sharing the new regime’s ideology with her brother Jürgen. But he sees things differently and refuses to distance himself from a Jewish friend, suffering grave consequences for his choice and causing Christa to question the regime’s teachings. When she meets and falls in love with Paul, a Jewish jeweler, her life is thrown into turmoil, and she must enlist the help of her grandmother to navigate her developing relationship despite the escalating risks. Upheaval ensues, but she refuses to back down from her burning desire to be with Paul.

Two Necklaces is the story of a German girl’s coming of age who dares to think for herself at a time when that very act was dangerous, even life-threatening. It delves into the very nature of the human condition with its frailty, strength, and the struggle of mind and heart.

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My 5 Star Review:

Christa is a lovely German girl living at home with her parents and grandmother. Her father is a distinguished business man and her mother owns a box company. And her Oma, her beloved grandmother, all play roles in this gripping story of oncoming war and Hitler’s hate for the Jews.

The story begins in 1933 Germany when Hitler steals power and begins his lying insinuations about Jews being insignificant. Young girls like Christa are sent to BDM classes to learn how to hate, and to be groomed for marrying, or plainly, getting impregnated by German soldiers to produce more Aryan children.

Christa has three friends who attend these classes – Gertrude, Vera and Brigit. Of the three, Gertrude and Brigit are proud Germans and Jew haters, while both Christa and Vera are very uncomfortable with what they are learning and witnessing.

Christa’s brother gets ‘sent away’ for being seen with a Jew, and her parents are adamant about Christa not talking to or showing any concern for Jews. But Christa and her Oma are both compassionate people, and as the story unfolds, take on some very scary situations as their compassion cannot help but help a young Jewish man, Paul, who Oma knows well.

For Christa’s birthday, Oma gives her a pendant necklace, which somehow gets broken, and there the real story begins. Oma offers to take Christa to a distant town where she knows a jeweler who can repair it, but upon their arrival to her friend, Nahum’s house, learns he’s no longer alive, but his son Paul, now running the business out of his house, is. Christa feels an immediate attraction to Paul, and later sneaks out of her house to pay him another visit. He is forlorn and opens up to her about the neighbors terrorizing him and gives him her necklace because she says it’s lucky.

Christa’s friend Gertrude becomes a true nazi, not surprising as her father is the brother of the famed Rudolph Hess. Gertrude visits Christa and tells her how she snoops in her father’s briefcase and finds plans for the removal of Jews after the 1936 Olympics. Christa’s dad is hired by the Reich, against his will, to help with the architectural plans to eliminate Jews, while her mother is steeped in grief at what has happened to her brother.

Paul stows away to Ravensburg where Christa lives after his home was set ablaze and underground resistance alerts Christa, who helps to hide Paul. It is Oma who has contact with Paul’s German neighbor who gets the action going to try and save Paul amongst the fear and angst going on in the new nazi Germany. Christa’s growing fondness for Paul puts her in some dangerous situations as her and Oma plot to get Paul out of Germany, as Christa’s relentless desires sometimes has her forgetting that she is putting her own life on the line, while her father is away from home months at a time working on plans for SS Himler to build concentration camps. As Oma’s plan to help save Paul puts the family in peril, a second necklace comes into play to help save Paul’s life.

I couldn’t put this book down in this gripping tale of good German’s risking their own lives to save one Jew from the likes of Hitler and his monsterous nazi regime. I’ve read many books and watched many documentaries on the horrors of the nazis and their capabilities and their zero regard for human life, but this story takes us on a journey through the other side of things – compassionate Germans who are against the regime, risking their own lives in secret to save the lives of others.

This book is a fast-paced page-turning read as we get a glimpse of war and hatred from the view of citizens who are unwillingly trapped in it, and a good look at human compassion that can still exist in a time where that alone could get one killed.

©2025

Bitmo Sunday book review

Sunday Book Review – Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson

Published on by dgkaye64 Comments

My Sunday Book Review is for Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson. Thanks to Netgalley for an advanced copy. This is a good escape read about a wealthy family of characters, their dysfunction, and for some – their oblivion about others who don’t come from money.

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Blurb:

“A vibrant and hilarious debut…Pineapple Street is riveting, timely, hugely entertaining and brimming with truth.” —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest

Darley, the eldest daughter in the closely-tied, carefully-guarded, old money Stockton family, made the classic feminine mistake and gave up her job for her children before she realized she’d sacrificed more of herself than she intended; Sasha married into the Stocktons, and finds herself the outsider looking into the fishbowl, wondering if she will ever understand their ways; and Georgianna, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t (and really shouldn’t) have, and must confront the kind of person she wants to be.

Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one percenters, Pineapple Street is a smart, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, loveable if fallible characters (and a few appalling ones!), it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots and everything in between, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a story that is a sheer delight of a read.

My 4 Star Review

A tale about how the 1% lives and their sometimes, oblivion to how the rest of the world live. It took one of the Stockton children, Cord, to marry out of money to bring awareness to the story by bringing in Sasha to bring attention to reality. The Stocktons come from old money and mother Tilda is both oblivious to those who aren’t as rich as much as she’s oblivious to the what’s really going on with her adult children – Cord, Darley and Georgianna.

Darley gives up her career for her husband Malcolm to raise two children and harbors a sore spot for her brother Cord who marries the middle class, artist, Sasha who were given Cord’s parents’ house on Pineapple Street to live in. Sasha finds it a bit like an old fashioned gaudy mansion of days of past and is scrutinized for her decisions, wanting more simplicity, by her upper class sister-in-laws and mother-in-law. Sasha tries to be friends with everyone, but her bougie sister-in-laws call her a gold digger behind her back – when clearly, she is not. In fact, her acceptance of signing a prenup (at her mother in-law’s insistence) with lame defense from Cord who fluffs it off as though it was for his own protection, would have been enough to send me packing – especially when his defense was ‘his family comes first’, before his wife to be.

Darley’s husband loses his important job and is afraid to let her parents know. Georgianna is a spoiled young woman who has no understanding about money. She falls in love with a married guy, believing he’ll leave his (pregant) wife for her some day, until tragedy strikes and Georgianna falls into a crazed depression, but her family are too self-centered to even notice until she loses it at Sasha’s baby reveal, and all the ugly truths start coming out.

At the end, the characters begin to recognize their flaws, apologies are made, and poor Sasha finally gets her wish for a brand new home – away from Pineapple Street. This was an enjoyable read, although I didn’t find it humorous, and except for Sasha, I found most of this family unlikeable characters. But that’s what keeps us reading!

©DGKaye2023

Bitmo Sunday book review

Sunday Book Review – Heartbroken – Field Notes on a Constant Condition by Laura Pratt, #Netgalley

Published on by dgkaye45 Comments

My Sunday Book Review is for Heart-broken by Laura Pratt. Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book. Laura Pratt writes about a broken relationship that still haunts her with the why of a sudden break-up that surprised her and left her unknowing why.

Blurb:

Imbued with longing, erudition and hard-earned wisdom, Heartbroken dares to delve into a universal ordeal—perhaps the one that makes us the most human of all.

When Laura Pratt’s long-distance partner of six years tells her “it’s over” at a busy downtown train station, she is sent reeling, the breakup coming out of the blue. He, meanwhile, closes himself off, refusing to acknowledge Laura and her requests for explanation.

In the following days, months and then years, Laura struggles to make sense of this sudden ending, alone and filled with questions. A journalist, she seeks to understand the freefall that is heartbreak and how so many before her survived it, drawing on forces across time and form, and uncovers literary, philosophical, scientific and psychological accounts of the mysterious alchemy of how we human beings fall in love in the first place, and why, when it ends, some of us take longer to get over it, or never do. She weaves this background of cultural history with her own bracing story of passionate love and its loss, and offers some hope for arriving—changed, broadened, grateful—on the other side.

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My 4 Star Review:

A heart rendering memoir by Laura Pratt written in lyrical prose as the author invites us into her heartbreak spanning a sudden end to a six-year relationship of the heart with no warning, just left to wonder what on earth happened to end her bliss. Also written as somewhat of a grief diary as Pratt conjures personal memories of her heartbreak. In this palpable writing, we feel the heartache along with the author as it is entwined with psychological research on conditions of the heart – broken heart syndrome, exuding love and the psychological heartbreak effects. In her telling, we learn that not everyone can just ‘move on’ from deep love lost.

This book is an observation of love and heartache in its pure rawness, vulnerability, and the festering of ongoing grief when the heart doesn’t reach acceptance. For anyone who as ever endured loss, whether a death or a lost relationship, you will identify with this book.

©DGKaye2023

Bitmo Sunday book review

Sunday Book Review – Ending Forever by Nicholas Conley

Published on by dgkaye49 Comments

Welcome to my Sunday Book Review. I was thrilled to receive a copy of this book through Netgalley once I read my friend Olga Miret’s review about it, Ending Forever by Nicholas Conley. It’s not too far out of my genre range, considering it’s a fictional story that deals with the afterlife – although in sort of a science fiction sort of way. I typically have been reading nonfiction books on the subject. And since this story has so many elements to it and deals with my top favorite subjects – compassion, humanity, love and grief, and so much more, I had to give it a read, and I loved it. The author himself in his acknowledgments states his book is, “strange, surreal fiction that doesn’t really fit into any specific genre box”.

Blurb:

Axel Rivers can’t get his head above water. Throughout his life, he’s worn many hats — orphan, musician, veteran, husband, father—but a year ago, a horrific event he now calls The Bad Day tore down everything he’d built. Grief-stricken, unemployed, and drowning in debt, Axel needs cash, however he can find it.

Enter Kindred Eternal Solutions. Founded by the world’s six wealthiest trillionaires and billionaires, Kindred promises to create eternal life through mastering the science of human resurrection. With the technology still being developed, Kindred seeks paid volunteers to undergo tests that will kill and resurrect their body—again and again—in exchange for a check.

Axel signs up willingly, but when he undergoes the procedure—and comes back, over and over—what will he find on the other side of death?

My 5 Star Review:

Love the dedication in front of the book: “Dedicated to everyone I have ever lost. Every sunset precedes a sunrise, and what the dead leave behind shapes the future. May the memory of you-each of you- be a blessing.”

Axel Rivers has had a lot of bad things happening in his life, mostly, what he refers to as ‘That bad day’. Down on his luck and funds, and carrying deep sorrow in his heart, he decides to sign up for the Kindred Eternal Solutions experimental program, run by the wealthiest of the elite. Those who’ve suffered hardship and in need of money are the targeted to sign up and receive a big check for taking part in this trial program, along with some of the curious who want to learn what does happen on the other side. Besides the big paycheck for signing up for this series of deaths and resurrections, Axel hopes to be able to see that infamous light so talked about on the other side as well as the privilege to meet up with his dearly missed lost loved ones.

These volunteers are put to a death sleep in a chamber and monitored through their temporary death state by doctors and scientists, and are promised to be brought back to life within hours, and must complete the death/resurrection process daily, six times in a row. The program is researching how to keep people alive through eternity, mainly for the purpose of the rich elite who run the program, trying to discover a way to cheat death for themselves.

At first Axel is very apprehensive but the thought of his overwhelming debt is what keeps him in the program. After his first session he feels disillusioned – he saw no light, no lost loved ones, and felt doom from meeting ‘the stranger’. He felt more depressed after the session, feeling as though he had a visitation from a dead family member later that day after first session. He thought it felt so real, not as though it were a spirit. His second session, he felt a breakthrough, met some of his lost loved ones, and saw the ‘Deathweavers’, – the ones in the next realm who make decision about when those on earth’s time is up.

Axel meets Brooklyn, a fellow partipant, single mother who has suffered many hardships in her own life, and they become friends and go out for drinks after day two of the experiment. On day three, Axel is late for that third session and is booted from the program. He decides to wait for Brooklyn to finish, when he discovers, she never showed up to that session. Axel learns from her sister that a tragedy has taken place and Brooklyn’s daughter Gwen is in intensive care dying from it. Axel’s new awakenings through the first two sessions drive him to approach the scientist at her home where he begs her to put him under one more time because he is sure he can bargain with the ‘Deathweavers’ and plead for Gwen’s life, and for her own scientific knowledge purposes, Dr. Carpenter agrees.

In Axel’s last time returning to death and resurrection, he learns a lot about himself and conquers boundaries that he learned he’d created around himself. He manages to get the attention of the Deathweavers and like everything else in life, they would only agree to let Gwen live if Axel gave up something precious of himself.

This book is about the fragility of life, overcoming one’s own tribulations and grief and gaining the selflessness to help another human being. Despite the paranormal-ish basis of the story, the strength of love and compassion shine through people when they are forced to surrender their own hurt and wounds to help the worse off.

The last few chapters were so captivating and beautiful, it was difficult to read without tears.

©DGKaye2022

Bitmo Sunday book review

Sunday Book Review – The Peaceful Village by Paulette Mahurin, #WWII #historicalfiction

Published on by dgkaye49 Comments

Welcome to my Sunday Book Review. Today I’m sharing a book by one of my favorite historical fiction authors, Paulette Mahurin. This is her newest release I was thrilled to be able to obtain a copy from Netgalley – The Peaceful Village. Based on a heartwrenchingly true story about one of the biggest WWII massacres on French Soil that occurred because of a lie.

Blurb:

During the German occupation of France, nestled in the lush, verdant countryside in the Haute-Vienne department of central France was the peaceful village of Oradour-sur-Glane. It was a community where villagers woke to the medley of nature’s songs: roosters crowing, birds chirping, cats purring, and cows shuffling out to pasture. The people who lived there loved the tranquil nature of their beautiful home, a tranquility that existed year-round. Even with the German occupation and Oradour-sur-Glane being incorporated as part of Vichy France, Oradour – the village with cafés, shops, and a commuter tram to Limoges – remained relatively untouched by the stress of the occupation.
While Oradour enjoyed the lack of German presence, twenty-two kilometers to the northwest in Limoges, the Germans were reacting with increasing cruelty to organized attacks on their soldiers by the armed resistance organization Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). Headed by Georges Guingouin, the Limoges FTP was considered the most effective of the French Resistance groups. Guingouin’s missions fueled the German military to kill and incarcerate in concentration camps anyone perceived as supporters or sympathizers of the Resistance.

Up until the middle of 1944, the German anti-partisan actions in France never rose to the level of brutality or number of civilian casualties that had occurred in eastern Europe. A little before the Allies landed in Normandy, that changed, when German officers stationed on the Eastern Front were transferred to France. It was then that FTP’s increasing efforts to disrupt German communications and supply lines was met with disproportionate counter attacks, involving civilians. Guingouin’s response was to target German officers. When Guingouin set his sights on two particular German officers, all hell broke loose.

Based on actual events as told by survivors, The Peaceful Village is the story of the unfolding of the events that led up to one of the biggest World War II massacres on French soil. But it is not simply a story of Nazi brutality and the futility of war, it is a story of love. The love of family. The love of neighbor. The love of country. Compassion and courage burn from the pages as the villagers’ stories come alive. Written by the international bestselling author of The Seven Year Dress, Paulette Mahurin, this book is an homage to the villagers who lived and loved in Oradour-sur-Glane.

My 5 Star Review:

Marguerite lives on her carrot farm with her husband and other family in the beautiful, peaceful village of Oradour, France. During WWII, this quiet and peaceful village had not yet been threatened or occupied as much as other parts of France and Europe by the nazis, despite the Vichy accepting German rule, until a German capture that had gone wrong had brought forth the brutal nazi regime (no, I will NEVER capitalize the word ‘nazi’) to this peaceful ‘untouched’ by war, town, just before the allies landed in Normandy.

As Marguerite was approaching menopause, the gruel of farming without enough hands was getting to her physically and mentally. She went to church one Sunday and discovered the clergy could use some well needed office help and approached her understanding husband asking for time away from working the farm and by taking up the offer to work for the church office. When she discovered a horrifying piece of paper in a book, as she was tidying the rectory, she approached Father Chapelle, asking if anyone else shared the office, ultimately, showing him what she’d found in a book as she was organizing a bookshelf. Their eye contact established a mutual understanding that they were both on the side against the nazis, when the Father let her know that he was part of the resistance helping place Jewish families where he could. Marguerite’s sympathetic and good nature led her to helping out the church by delivering secret messages, food and clothing where she could.

All was calm, but Marguerite had a foreboding feeling in her stomach, and it wasn’t long before the SS butchers rounded up the whole village in retaliation for the resistance killing one of their higher up murderous high rank nazi leaders. It was first the resistance who made a fatal mistake by letting another of their captured nazis escape, who made it back to headquarters and lied about what happened to him in this innocent village.

Mahurin tells a gripping story in such detail, it’s as though we are there witnessing the action. She paints a picture of this blissful town full of compassionate, loving, neighborly people going on with their business as though the rest of France had nothing to do with them in their sacred untouched perimeters, and just as the serenity turns to hell on earth, she equally writes of the pain, brutality, butchering of innocent mankind because of one SS trying to cover his ass by lying about his attack saying it had taken place in Oradour – when it did not! This lie became the war that wiped out an entire peaceful village in one day.

Based on true events as told by survivors, one of biggest WWII massacres that ever took place on French soil. The expensive price of human life paid for letting one of those heinous, murderous nazis escape capture. The author never disappoints in her gripping true tales of some of the true horrors that innocent people endured under the brutal tyranny of Hitler and his nazi evil regime.

©DGKaye2022