A review by rebeccawolfe
Motherland by Maria Hummel

4.0

Writing stories of WWII-era German civilians is tricky. This one seems pretty fair and unflinching. It's based on letters from her grandparents. I like the author's description of her approach: "I could not use hindsight as a knife to slice through the past and find anything but what I expected to find. Instead of asking, 'What did they know, and when did they know it?' I began to ask, 'What did they love? What did they fear?' and in place of a fabricated fable, a complicated human story began to emerge."