11/14/19 ARIA BLOG TOUR: The Girl I Left Behind
PUB: ARIA
PUB DATE: 3rd October, 2019
Paperback 366 pages; Kindle Edition 368 pages
Synopsis:
What would you risk to save your best-friend?
As a young girl, Ella never considered that those around her weren't as they appeared. But when her childhood best friend shows Ella that you can't always believe what you see, Ella finds herself thrown into the world of the German Resistance.
On a dark night in 1941, Claudia is taken by the Gestapo, likely never to be seen again, unless Ella can save her. With the help of the man she loves, Ella must undertake her most dangerous mission yet and infiltrate the Nazi Party.
Selling secrets isn't an easy job. In order to find Claudia, Ella must risk not only her life, but the lives of those she cares about.
Will Ella be able to leave behind the girl of her youth and step into the shoes of another?
Perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The German Midwife and Kate Furnivall.
THOUGHTS:
“A good shop girl can make a person believe anything”.Ella an 18 year old girl who lost her parents from a car accident, now lives with her aunt, who is an antique shop owner, living in Nuremberg, Germany. Ella helps in the antique shop and has developed a talent in working with the customers to make a sale.
Her aunt, a strong nationalist ensured Ella become a member of the League of German Girls, a female branch of the Hitler Youth, where Ella is taught of Hitler’s indoctrination. In the League, Ella befriends Claudia who helps her realize that what they had been taught to admire was not worth admiring at all, and they cannot believe everything they hear and see from the propagandas against the Jews.
Ella with Claudia join a group of rebels, the German Resistance, and help in the efforts against Germany’s Third Reich. First starting out as a courier but later saves families from imprisonment, torture and worse, death.
Risking being caught in Nuremberg, her aunt arranges for Ella to move to Munich, where she secures a position as a secretary for the branch of government that handles and audits the files on Germany’s enemies. Through this, she is able to gain information to help the Resistance.
What will Ella continue to do to save others at the risk of her own life and the people she loves?
The book, “The Girl I Left Behind” by Andie Newton is a fantastic debut novel. This is a beautifully and well researched story that I thoroughly enjoyed reading from the vantage point of a young German girl, Ella. I loved that the story is seen through her eyes as she is coming to grips with her world changing, and seeing her country, family, and friends changed by the war.
This was an emotional story that had my interest from the very first page and will keep you turning those pages. I highly recommend this amazing book from Andie Newton. This was a story of bravery, survival and love.
Author Spotlight:
Please enjoy this Excerpt:
Germany
The man was a spy. This much he would have admitted, but only if the ropes had tightened just a hair more around his wrists, or if the water they threw on him had got any colder. There was, after all, only so much torture a man could take in Nazi Germany before his defenses would break and his British accent would betray him.
The Gestapo had perfected their torture techniques, and contrary to belief, they liked to use the dullest knives, not the sharpest. The dull ones caused more pain and had been proven to yield much more information. Luckily enough for the man, informants hadn’t learned this technique, and while they decided on the best approach for extraction, the man had wiggled out from the ropes that bound him, reached for the dagger he always carried in a sheath above his right ankle, and killed his way out of the Munich storage room where they’d held him captive.
He dared not go home to his flat for fear they’d already discovered where he lived. Instead, he broke for the side exit, shuffling down the long corridor the best he could with an injured leg that caused him to limp.
A trample roared just above him one floor up, and he listened with his eyes to the ceiling, counting the thumps, deciding how many informants were on the verge of discovering he’d gotten away. He limped on at a galloping rate, knowing his own hobbling could be heard, and burst out the side doors into the dark alley, tripping into some garbage bins that hadn’t been dumped.
A cat screeched from somewhere, and he stumbled forward, rushing toward his contact who’d been waiting for him outside for more than an hour—a girl, a shop girl, she had told him not long ago, who gleamed like a new coin in the night. She waved the bouquet she’d bought earlier, concealing the intelligence tucked inside. ‘Where have you been?’ she said, and he snatched the flowers from her hands.
His throat was dry, and try as he might, he didn’t have the strength to tell her he’d been caught but he did have the sense to tell her to run, and she took off in the other direction.
The man rounded the corner onto the street, and for a moment breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he’d outsmarted the informants and that his spy was safe. He took a deep breath, but then slumped forward from a surprise, life-ending stab to his abdomen.
The informant yanked the bouquet from the man’s hands, laughing as he pulled his knife back, letting the man walk his last humiliating steps into a crowded square where he would die.
And when the man fell onto the cobblestones, people stopped and stared. To his horror, just when he was about to take his last gurgling breath, the girl he’d told to run leaned over his body and looked into his eyes. He saw the shock on her face, and then heard it from the others when English words spilled from his lips.
As she covered her mouth watching him die, his last thought was not one of shame for having been caught, but of guilt, because he’d remembered that hidden under his mattress with his notes, he had scrawled her name on a piece of paper.
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