Wednesday, October 29, 2014

What We Did for Love.

Farrant, Natasha.  What We Did for Love.  Enslow  2014  208p  $17.95  ISBN 978-1-62324-028-8  hs/adult      Historical fiction     VG-BN

What We Did For Love is based on a true story about a little village in France where the Nazis ordered the whole village into the town square and massacred everyone.  This is a fictional romance that takes place in the months and days leading up to the massacre.  Arianne and Luc are teenagers in love, and unbeknownst to Arianne, Luc has been doing some work for the Resistance.  The day he tells her he is going to join a group of Resistance fighters and leave, there is a huge train explosion, and his name is implicated.  The Nazis come looking for him, and the rest is brutally violent and unfortunately, it really happened.

The book may take a second reading, even by the most sophisticated of readers.  It appears that characters are being introduced willy nilly, and it is a little bit hard to keep track of them in the first part of the book.  Later they come into play more, and things fall into place, but there were moments of confusion for this reader.  The Afterword explains what really happened in the village of Oradour sur Glane in June 1944, and it is possibly that this should have appeared at the beginning of the book.  However, even with its faults, this is a gripping read that teaches yet another aspect of World War 2 from the point of view of a young French girl.             
Summary: Based on a true story about a little village in France where the Nazis ordered the whole village into the town square and massacred everyone.  This is a fictional romance story that takes place in the months and days leading up to the massacre.  

World War II-Fiction, French Resistance-Fiction --Carol Kennedy

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