afrolicthroughfiction 's review for:

Prisoner of Night and Fog by Anne Blankman

4.0

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Review originally posted on my book blog: https://afrolicthroughfiction.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/we-could-all-have-been-a-prisoner-of-night-and-fog-by-anne-blankman/

If you like historical fiction, read this book.

Sure, it’s historical FICTION, but the amount of things I learnt about history while reading this actually surprised me. I love history, so books like this are sort of like a comfort to me. To be able to relate to a fact that I already know, however small…that somehow brings me closer to the story.

I was gripped by this book straight away, purely out of wonder. I found it so strange to see Hitler described the way he was in the beginning, and I just had to keep reading to understand what on earth was going through the character’s minds. I mean, we know him as this awful man that caused the death of thousands and was pretty much the definition of tyranny. But in this book we see him idolized by many – just like he would have been during the time. And it just really helped me see that side of the story, however horrifying I found the idea of it.

And then the whole mystery is triggered. I felt like Gretchen (the main character). I wanted to solve the mystery just as much as she did. Though luckily for me, while she encountered a huge number of dangers on this journey, I got to experience it from the comfort of my own room. There was many a time I forgot that I was reading, and felt like I stood beside Gretchen as she went through the story. And that’s how you know you’re reading a good book.

Speaking of Gretchen, I loved her! She was so intelligent, wary, brave…and you could rally see how her personality develops with each event that happens. I would honestly love to be like her. Plus, there was one thought from her that really stuck with me:

Maybe she didn’t matter enough to the Brauns, certainly not enough to her mother and Uncle Dolf, and definitely not at all to Reinhard. But she mattered to herself. And that was all that needed to be true.

I just can’t help but think that is such an empowering message.

I know that one thing that might put people off this book is the German setting. Now, I don’t mean people don’t like Germany. What I mean is the language. So many German words – place names, objects etc – were used throughout this book. Now, I had absolutely no issue with this, since it just made the setting so much more realistic. But when it came to pronunciation, I did have to stop and really think about it. So just bare that in mind. But like I said, it doesn’t really take anything away from the story…it actually just encourages the setting.

You really see that power is everything through history. This book is such a perfect example of that. There’s so much tension built up through these pages. The amount of times I felt like I had a little ball of anxiety in my gut while reading this story…UGH. It was insane.

It made me wonder what sort of world we would live in today if history went the other way. But I already know the answer to that. We would all be a prisoner of night and fog.