Reviews with content warning for Death - Lilac Girls

If you watched “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” and you still want to cry over true-story-inspired WWII trauma, then this book is for you. I can’t say that it’s for me, per se - it was my book club’s pick this month. I can say the following:

The second half of the book is much better than the first. The first 50% of the book alternates between 3 different female POVs and, as a result, I kept pinging between 3 different feelings - boredom, sadness, and shock. It had me feeling so downtrodden that I didn’t want to finish it. However…these atrocities are a part of history. They happened to real humans and, tragically, were committed by real humans. And their stories deserve to be heard, then to never happen again. As Norman Cousins wrote, “…what is told here is not a glimpse into the bowels of an imaginary hell but part of our world.”

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nlyssy99's review

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emotional informative sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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keeyoh's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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emilyrollande's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.75

Such an interesting + harrowing story + I enjoyed the POVs of the 3 different women. Definitely could have done with less focus on Caroline’s relationship with the married character Paul though.

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pagesfromhome's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

This is a tough one to review because once again it is fictionalizing real people and real events, but since it was presented clearly as a novel, I went ahead and star-rated it based on simply the writing (not the events or people).

There were moments of this book that were completely shining and did an incredible job of transporting and teaching me, but unfortunately, so much of it read like the author had wanted to write a non-fiction book but instead wrote a fiction one. There were three POVs, all of which could have had a single book to themselves, and it spanned almost 20 years in these characters' lives (from just as WWII was starting to just before 1960), meaning that you had to fly through sections of their lives in mere sentences to try to get through it all. But it still felt like the story dragged through other sections so it was simultaneously fast and slow.

It also felt like every character was written with the same style and voice so, while the dialogue and how they literally spoke to other characters separated them, everything else just felt like it was written in the same, rather flat tone despite the vast differences between each character's experience and the use of first-person narration.

I think a story that only covered Caroline's or Kasia's lives would have been far more impactful, or even one dedicated to Herta's although she was despicable, would have been a more stable way to tackle the story of Ravensbruck. That said, this is a challenging story to take on and the author clearly took time and care to tell the story.

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