Blog Tour and Book Review ~ The Girl in the Striped Dress ~ Ellie Midwood #Bookouture

 

TITLE - The Girl in the Striped Dress

AUTHOR - Ellie Midwood

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SYNOPSIS -

Auschwitz, 1942: This unforgettable novel, based on a true story, brings to life history’s most powerful tale of forbidden love. Set within the barbed wire of Auschwitz, a man and a woman fall in love against unimaginable odds. What happens next will restore your faith in humanity, and make you believe in hope even where hope should not exist. 

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he whispered, pressing a note into her hand. Her entire body trembled when she read it: I am in love with you.

Helena steps off the cattle train onto the frozen grounds of Auschwitz. She has twenty-four hours to live. Scheduled to be killed tomorrow, she is not even tattooed with a prison number. As the snow falls around her, she shivers, knowing that she has been sentenced to death for a crime she didn’t commit.

When a gray-clad officer marches towards Helena and pulls her away, she fears the worst. Instead, he tells her that it’s one of the guard’s birthdays and orders her to serenade him.

Inside the SS barracks the air is warm, thick with cigarette smoke and boisterous conversation. After she sings to the guard, Franz, he presses a piece of cake into her hands––the first thing she has eaten in days. On the spot, he orders her life to be saved, forever changing the course of her fate.

What follows is a love story that was forbidden, that should have been impossible, and yet saved both of their lives––and hundreds of others––in more ways than one.

Fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Choice, and The Orphan Train will be utterly entranced by this unputdownable page-turner. This completely heartbreaking yet beautifully hopeful novel shows that love can survive anything and grow anywhere.

*Previously titled: Auschwitz Syndrome

I have read many Auschwitz related books including The Violinist of Auschwitz, also by Ellie Midwood. You start to think you've read everything about what "inmates" did, to survive this most horrendous time in history, then another book comes along like this one, and throws more tales of sadness, heroism and love into the mix. 

This is an outstanding read of the horrors of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Some of the events in this book caused a lot of conversation between myself and my Husband. We discussed both the horrors and some of the good things (if the word "good" is the corret one to use). We talked about how not all the Nazi's were sadistic and how some had been recruited into the role. 

This book is well researched and certainly generated many thoughts and conversations. Although I found it quite slow to start with, thinking it was just going to go over things covered in other books of the same genre, it moved on and came into it's own. The "characters" are well described and delicately portrayed. It is a very thought provoking read. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ellie Midwood is a USA Today bestselling and award-winning historical fiction author. She owes her interest in the history of the Second World War to her grandfather, Junior Sergeant in the 2nd Guards Tank Army of the First Belorussian Front, who began telling her about his experiences on the frontline

when she was a young girl. Growing up, her interest in history only deepened and transformed from reading about the war to writing about it. After obtaining her BA in Linguistics, Ellie decided to make writing her full-time career and began working on her first full-length historical novel, The Girl from Berlin.' Ellie is continuously enriching her library with new research material and feeds her passion for WWII and Holocaust history by collecting rare memorabilia and documents.

In her free time, Ellie is a health-obsessed yoga enthusiast, neat freak, adventurer, Nazi Germany history expert, polyglot, philosopher, a proud Jew, and a doggie mama. Ellie lives in New York with her fiancé and their Chihuahua named Shark Bait.

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Website: http://elliemidwood.com/

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