A review by lawbooks600
Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood, Greg Dawson

emotional medium-paced

4.0

Representation: Jewish characters
Score: Six and a half out of ten.

Well. Alias Anna circled my recommendations till I saw it on a library display shelf when I decided to pick it up. I glanced at the blurb, making it seem unique as it was a biography-in-verse about a young musician set in World War Two. I picked the book up and when I closed the final page, I enjoyed most of it, except for one part.

It starts with the first person I see, Zhanna, living peacefully as a child in the late 1920s and early 1930s in what is now Ukraine in the opening pages. Everything changed in the late 1930s when the war began, but not much happens initially until 1941, when the Germans invaded Ukraine, forcing Zhanna and her family to leave. There is a crucial subplot involving Zhanna becoming a pianist from her early childhood and her sister, Frina, later joins her, which I found intriguing. 

Soon enough, Zhanna and Frina were alone and the only action they could do is escape to any safe place they could find, but most prominently, they had to change their names to Anna and Marina respectively, so no one could discover who they were. Zhanna and her sister continued to use their aliases until the end of the war when they found peace in Berlin due to other helpful people, but I had a problem with one page. The narrative says music was a way to bring the Nazis and the Jews on the same level away from the war on that page. 

The authors, Susan Hood and Greg Dawson, could've removed it, but it stayed there. What is the point of this passage? Is it trying to say that all people are equal and music is a way to bring them together and a coping strategy to ignore the war? The Nazis and the Jews are not on the same level. I could've given Alias Anna eight out of ten, but those words alone made me knock off a point and a half. I liked the writing style, which is all in poetry and not spaced out prose like other novels-in-verse, the overarching theme of resilience and the extra reading material in the end. The conclusion is a high note when Zhanna moves to America after the conflict. That's it.
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