by Heather B Moore
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Pages: 368
Format: eARC
Buy the Book: Amazon
Goodreads: Sometimes all you have is hope.
In the summer of 1961, a wall of barbed wire goes up quickly in the dead of night, officially dividing Berlin. Aware of the many whose families have been divided, Luisa joins a secret spy network, risking her life to help East Germans escape across the Berlin Wall and into the West.
Bob Inama, a soldier in the US Army, is stationed in West Germany. He’s glad to be fluent in German, especially after meeting Luisa Voigt at a church social. As they spend time together, they form a close connection. But when Bob receives classified orders to leave for undercover work immediately, he doesn’t get the chance to say goodbye.
With a fake identity, Bob’s special assignment is to be a spy embedded in East Germany, identifying possible targets for the US military. But Soviet and East German spies, the secret police, and Stasi informants are everywhere, and the danger of being caught and sent to a brutal East German prison lurks on every corner.
Kritters Thoughts: Two main characters make up this story - Bob Inama, a true person who gave the author hours of interviews in order to create his story and then gave the inspiration for Louis Voigt the other main character who had a little more fiction involved in her story. Bob was a solider with the US Army stationed in West Germany during the very hard time as the Berlin Wall was being constructed and the borders were affecting the people of both Berlin and Germany. Louisa was a German resident, a daughter of a police officer and a recent graduate of nursing school who was watching her home country fall apart.
Switching back and forth between Bob and Louisa's point of view, this book focused on a time and place that isn't often represented in books - post World War II as countries are occupying Germany and the country is trying to heal from a war that split the population into several pieces. Before reading this book, I was more familiar with the news of the Berlin wall coming down, while I was young when it happened, I have been more aware of the anniversaries and the news of those events, so to read about the people before it went up and the months after it was built was educational.
While the events were interesting to me while reading this book, the characters were built a way that it was hard to put this down as you follow both of them through the ups and downs of the volatile events of the day. Louisa's parts were my favorite, maybe because I am married to a police officer or maybe because I hope I would react like she did and step up and risk my life to help people, but her parts were riveting. I appreciated that Bob's story was so close to fact, but that also made reading his part of the story hard because I knew that his story wasn't far from fiction and there were moments where his story was hard to read.
This was my second book I have read by Heather B Moore and I have loved both, so I want to dive into her backlist and anticipate what she has coming next.
Rating: definitely a good read, but can't read two in a row
Ebook 2021 Challenge: 109 out of 100
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received one copy of this book free of charge from Shadow Mountain Publishing. I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own.
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