Blog Tour Q&A: The Girl I Left Behind by Andie Newton

Please join me in welcoming Andie Newton to Let Them Read Books! Andie is touring the blogosphere with her debut historical novel, The Girl I Left Behind, and I had the chance to ask her about the inspiration for the story and the characters. Read on and enter to win a paperback copy of The Girl I Left Behind!

What would you risk to save our best-friend?

As a young girl, Ella never considered that those around her weren’t as they appeared. But when her childhood best-friend shows Ella that you can’t always believe what you see, Ella finds herself thrown into the world of the German Resistance.

On a dark night in 1941, Claudia is taken by the Gestapo, likely never to be seen again, unless Ella can save her. With the help of the man she loves, Ella must undertake her most dangerous mission yet and infiltrate the Nazi Party.

Selling secrets isn’t an easy job. In order to find Claudia, Ella must risk not only her life, but the lives of those she cares about.

Will Ella be able to leave behind the girl of her youth and step into the shoes of another?

Perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The German Midwife and Kate Furnivall.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON | BARNES AND NOBLE | APPLE IBOOKS | KOBO

Hi Andie! Thanks so much for stopping by Let Them Read Books!

What inspired you to write The Girl I Left Behind?

I never thought I’d write a novel. Ever. By accident, I caught a documentary on the History Channel that talked about the youth resistance. I have a degree in history, so I suppose you can say my thoughts are already in the past, and when I find areas of history that I don’t know a lot about, I’m always inspired to find out more. I searched for a novel about the youth German Resistance and couldn’t find one, and as cliché as it sounds, I set out to write the novel I wanted to read.

I had so many questions. How far would a young person go in the name of freedom? Most importantly, what would make them break? In my book, Ella, the main character, joins a resistance group called the Falcons. This group was inspired by the resistance groups that existed in Nazi Germany at the time. The White Rose, probably one of the most notable youth resistance groups, was a passive group of young adults known for their anti-Nazi leaflets. The Swing Kids was another, a group (and a movement) who openly resisted the confines of Nazi behavior. They listened to banned music and essentially behaved like American teens, which was absolutely scandalous and an arrestable offense. However, not all youth resistance groups were passive. In fact, some were violent street thugs who sought out kids in the Hitler Youth to beat up.

Yet, in between these groups, between the passive and the aggressive, there were youths printing phony identification papers and providing safe houses for Jews—ah, now this was getting very interesting. Then there were the special sects: renegades—some of them female—who sabotaged patrols, schemed to assassinate Hitler, and infiltrated the Reich to spy for the British. It was upon learning this that the idea to have The Girl I Left Behind play out as a female-driven spy novel became too good to resist. 

Spotlight: Unshelled: A Tale of the Nutcracker by M.J. Neary

Unshelled: A Tale of the Nutcracker

by M.J. Neary

April 6, 2019

Crossroad Press

Historical Fiction

eBook; 94 pages

West Germany, 1915.

Marie Stahl, a stoic combat nurse in her late twenties, unhindered by her own ailments, converts her family countryside estate into a convalescent home for soldiers slapped with the controversial diagnosis "shell shock". Her only helpers are two taciturn factory girls of Slavic descent. Marie's altruistic endeavor brings on the wrath of her embittered brother Fritz, a Sergeant-Major in the Germany army. Having lost a foot in the trenches, he considers these men traitors, deserving of execution, not sympathy. The one he detests most is Christoph Ahrens, an engineering student nicknamed "Nutcracker" for his unusually strong jaw.

Despite her morose disposition, Marie finds herself intrigued by the haunted youngster, who turns out to be a pupil of her godfather, Dr. Drosselmeyer, a physics lecturer at the University of Cologne and a military technology pioneer. As Marie and Christoph grow closer, he confides in her about his nightmares. The most horrifying images are not of his experiences in the trenches but of Germany's future—the old country they have been proud to serve will not exist twenty years later. As a woman of science, Marie rejects the notion of clairvoyance, although a part of her cannot help but wonder if there is some truth to his predictions.

In the meantime, the atmosphere at the convalescent home grows more hostile as the patients turn on each other and Marie begins to question her altruism.

Set against the violence and paranoia of the Great War, Unshelled is a gritty, sinister retelling of the Christmas classic.

Readers call it "a highly compelling read" and "a unique interpretation of the classic."

Amazon  ~  Barnes & Noble  ~  Goodreads

About the Author:

A self-centered, only child of classical musicians, Marina Julia Neary spent her early years in Eastern Europe and came to the US at the age of thirteen. Her literary career revolves around depicting military and social disasters, from the Charge of the Light Brigade, to the Irish Famine, to the Easter Rising in Dublin, to the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl some thirty miles away from her home town. Notorious for her abrasive personality and politically incorrect views that make her a persona non grata in most polite circles, Neary explores human suffering through the prism of dark humor, believing that tragedy and comedy go hand in hand.

Guest Post: When They Made Us Leave by Annette Oppenlander

Please join me in welcoming Annette Oppenlander to Let Them Read Books! Annette is celebrating the release of her new historical novel, When They Made Us Leave, and I'm thrilled to have her here today with a guest post about the subject of the novel, Nazi Germany's KLV child evacuation program.

When They Made Us Leave tells the touching love story of Hilda and Peter, whose budding relationship ends abruptly when they are forced to attend separate evacuation camps during WWII. Each confronted with terror and cruelty as well as unexpected kindness, they must rise above to survive the war and find each other once more. 

Solingen, 1943: As bombs carpet Germany and fourteen-year old Hilda is falling in love with her childhood friend and next-door neighbor, Peter, he excitedly takes off to an evacuation camp in Pomerania, six hundred miles from home. Though Peter soon finds that his expectations are far from reality, he is ordered to write happy letters home, even when things take a turn for the worse and a new Hitler youth leader attempts to convert camp into a military battalion.

Meanwhile, Hilda must unwillingly accompany her classmates to a cloister in Bavaria run by a draconian Abbess. There Hilda struggles to overcome her homesickness and yearning for Peter while helping a classmate hide her bedwetting accidents.

As Germany is buried under rubble and supplies shorten, Peter lands at an inn near Gdansk. By now, all he wants is to go home. But his new teacher, a staunch national socialist, deems their place safe despite the refugees from the east whispering of German defeat by an advancing Russian Army.

When the cloister is converted into a German field hospital, enemy planes destroy Hilda’s homebound train and kill her teacher. Weeks later, tired and hungry, she arrives home to find her mother safe. But Peter has not returned, nor is there any news of him. Refusing to believe the worst, she must survive in a barely recognizable world.

Amazon  ~  Barnes & Noble  ~  Goodreads  ~  Author Website

Few people outside Germany realize that during World War II Hitler created a wide-sweeping evacuation program, the Kinderlandverschickung or KLV, for its German children and youths. This supposedly voluntary program intended to send children and especially teens aged 11 to 16 to camps. Not just for a few weeks, but for months, and as of 1943 for years. Since exact statistics are missing, it is estimated that two million children participated.

The word evacuation or Evakuierung was not to be used because it carried the wrong connotation not suitable for the propaganda of the Third Reich. Instead, the KLV was sold to parents as a vacation during which children could study, exercise and play in healthy environments, eat well and enjoy themselves tremendously. Posters showed happy children going on adventure, newspapers ran beautiful stories of summer trips and joyous parents sending off their kids. That was the official version.

The unofficial true intent was to raise Germany’s children and youth as national socialists far from the influence of families, friends and churches. To do this effectively, many camps assumed militaristic programs with strict all-day schedules, inspections, reports and training.  Boys were supposed to be tough and heroic and become soldiers. Girls were supposed to be strong and brave, but also beautiful and healthy to grow into mothers to produce more children to become more soldiers and mothers.

Blog Tour Spotlight: In the Full Light of the Sun by Clare Clark

In the Full Light of the Sun by Clare Clark

Publication Date: July 9, 2019

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Hardcover, Paperback, & eBook

Genre: Historical Fiction

Based on a true story, this gorgeous new novel follows the fortunes of three Berliners caught up in an art scandal—involving newly discovered van Goghs—that rocks Germany amidst the Nazis’ rise to power.

Hedonistic and politically turbulent, Berlin in the 1920s is a city of seedy night clubs and sumptuous art galleries. It is home to millionaires and mobs storming bakeries for rationed bread. These disparate Berlins collide when Emmeline, a young art student; Julius, an art expert; and a mysterious dealer named Rachmann all find themselves caught up in the astonishing discovery of thirty-two previously unknown paintings by Vincent van Gogh.

In the Full Light of the Sun explores the trio’s complex relationships and motivations, their hopes, their vanities, and their self-delusions—for the paintings are fakes and they are in their own ways complicit. Theirs is a cautionary tale about of the aspirations of the new Germany and a generation determined to put the humiliations of the past behind them.

With her signature impeccable and evocative historical detail, Clare Clark has written a gripping novel about beauty and justice, and the truth that may be found when our most treasured beliefs are revealed as illusions.

Praise

“As compelling as it is expansive… In an age that has apparently lost faith in experts and verifiable sources of information, Clark’s fictionalization of the Wacker affair stands as a salutary tale for the post-truth era.” —The Guardian

“[Clark] excels at evoking the febrile tensions of the Weimar Republic… A gripping and ultimately moving story about art, artifice and authenticity.” —The Mail on Sunday

“With great skill and sympathy, Clark evokes a febrile society in which politics, love and art offer no certainties, and the ground always threatens to open beneath her characters’ feet.” —The Sunday Times

“Set over the decade of the Nazis’ rise to power, In the Full Light of the Sun loosely follows the real-life mystery of whether paintings apparently by Van Gogh that were exhibited in Berlin in the 1920s were forgeries…The most enjoyable mystery here is the matter of whether anyone is really their authentic self.” —The Times (UK)

“An engrossing read.” —Image Magazine Ireland

“Clark’s beautiful writing is as dense and layered as thick, Post-Impressionist oils.” —Tablet

“A completely fascinating novel about the early 20th century art world and its many dubious machinations. Expertly researched, compellingly narrated and full of potent resonance today.” —William Boyd, author of Sweet Caress

“Clare Clark casts her spell of time and place with casual elegance and no apparent tricks - yet caught me up in this juicy story of colossal art fraud, the passions and intrigues of her vivid and moving characters - and the truly terrifying rise of the Nazi party, with all its contemporary echoes. The atmosphere of this book lingers on.” —Laline Paull, author of The Bees

“I loved In the Full Light of the Sun, a novel about deception, self-deception, truth, love and lies that will enthrall anyone fascinated by Van Gogh, the art world and Berlin in the 1920s. Written with verve and assurance it is both engaging and humane.” —Amanda Craig, author of the Lie of the Land
“In her gripping new novel Clare Clark paints a picture of Weimar Berlin in which surface glitter hides sinister and bitter truths. Page by page she brings secret lives into the light; nothing: not love, not art, not politics, is what it seems, and few escape the brutal forces that emerge.” —Stella Tillyard, author of Aristocrats

Blog Tour Excerpt: Chasing the Wind by C.C. Humphreys

CHASING THE WIND BY C.C. HUMPHREYS

Publication Date: June 5, 2018

Paperback & eBook; 320 Pages

Genre: Historical/Women’s Fiction/Mystery

Smuggler. Smoker. Aviatrix. Thief. The dynamic Roxy Loewen is all these things and more, in this riveting and gorgeous historical fiction novel for readers of Paula McLain, Roberta Rich, Kate Morton and Jacqueline Winspear.

You should never fall in love with a flyer. You should only fall in love with flight.

That’s what Roxy Loewen always thought, until she falls for fellow pilot Jocco Zomack as they run guns into Ethiopia. Jocco may be a godless commie, but his father is a leading art dealer and he’s found the original of Bruegel’s famous painting, the Fall of Icarus. The trouble is, it’s in Spain, a country slipping fast into civil war. The money’s better than good–if Roxy can just get the painting to Berlin and back out again before Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring and his Nazi pals get their hands on it . . .

But this is 1936, and Hitler’s Olympics are in full swing. Not only that, but Göring has teamed up with Roxy’s greatest enemy: Sydney Munroe, an American billionaire responsible for the death of her beloved dad seven years before. When the Nazis steal the painting, Roxy and Jocco decide that they are just going to have to steal it back.

What happens when Icarus flies too close to the sun? Roxy is going to find out. From African skies to a cellar in Madrid, from the shadow cast by the swastika to the world above the clouds on the Hindenburg’s last voyage, in the end Roxy will have just two choices left–but only one bullet.

Excerpt:

There’s nothing like dying to make a girl appreciate living.

As she stared down into the pitiless black of the night, seeking, forever seeking, the one pinpoint of light that might yet save her— but it had better hurry up—Roxy Loewen thought about what was waiting for her.

A straw-roofed hut with a tin bath filled with tepid water on its third use that would feel like a clawfoot tub at the Plaza. Rum so raw it hurt your eyes but when mixed with tamarind juice would taste like a Negroni at the Ritz. Steak from a camel or an ass surpassing the finest filet mignon that Rex’s 110th Street chop house could serve.

And at the end of all those, a German. Jochen Zomack—Jocco— with his big hands and his big laugh and the hank of brown hair that, when he let it fall over his face just so and in the right light, made him look like Cary Grant. Jocco, down there somewhere, scanning the black skies as she scanned the black ground, ready with his light.

If her message had gotten through. Communications had been sketchy since the Italians had begun what many were saying would be their final offensive. The gallant, heavily outgunned Ethiopians— guns, hell, a lot of them still fought with spears—would make their last stand against the invader near their capital, Addis Ababa.

The rumours had decided her. To fly her cargo of rifles west into that war zone was suicide. If the Italians didn’t shoot her out of the sky, there probably wouldn’t be an airfield left to land on. The one where she waited at Malco Dube would also be bombed again. Even if her Lockheed 227—Asteria 6, Roxy called her—wasn’t hit on the ground, there wouldn’t be enough time to fill in the craters on the runway that was already more gopher burrow than the racetrack it once had been. But if she could get her cargo to Jocco, he’d know what to do with it. He’d know where some of his comrades might still be fighting. He had run guns all over this continent. All over the world, truly. Hell, he might even get her paid. Though it wasn’t so much the money she’d been thinking of as she’d taken off from the foothills of the mountains and headed toward a moon just peeking in the east. It was him. Lying with him. There was a time she might have blushed at that thought. But she didn’t blush so much anymore.
Night fell fast this close to the equator, but the moon was a day off full and that had given her hope. Three hours’ flight and a landing by moonlight? She’d done that before, half a dozen times.

What she hadn’t reckoned on were the thick cumulus clouds rolling in from the Indian Ocean. She was under them now, halfway between the ceiling and the floor about two hundred feet below her. Flying star quadrants, covering ground above what she hoped was still the airfield at Dubaro. There were no lights. Italian pilots were so bored they would drop a bomb on a fella lighting a cheroot in his cupped hand. The terrain was featureless enough in daylight—arid, scrubby hills or thick jungle, especially this close to the coast. At night there was . . . nothing.

Blog Tour Guest Post: The Soldier's Return by Laura Libricz

Please join me in welcoming Laura Libricz to Let Them Read Books! Laura is touring the blogosphere with her new release, The Soldier's Return, book two in the Heaven's Pond trilogy. I'm pleased to have her here today with a guest post about the inspiration behind the story. Read on and enter to win the first two books in the trilogy!

The year is 1626. A senseless war rips through parts of Germany. Ongoing animosity between the Catholics and the Protestants has turned into an excuse to destroy much of the landscape situated between France, Italy and Denmark. But religion only plays a minor role in this lucrative business of war.

The young dutchman, Pieter van Diemen, returns to Amsterdam in chains after a period of imprisonment in the Spice Islands. He manages to escape but must leave Amsterdam in a hurry. Soldiers are in demand in Germany and he decides to travel with a regiment until he can desert. His hope of survival is to reach Sichardtshof, the farm in Franconia, Germany; the farm he left ten years ago. His desire to seek refuge with them lies in his fond memories of the maid Katarina and her master, the humanist patrician Herr Tucher. But ten years is a long time and the farm has changed. Franconia is not only torn by war but falling victim to a church-driven witch hunt. The Jesuit priest, Ralf, has his sights set on Sichardtshof as well. Ralf believes that ridding the area of evil will be his saving grace. Can Pieter, Katarina and Herr Tucher unite to fight against a senseless war out of control?
​
The Soldier’s Return is the second book in the Heaven’s Pond Trilogy.

Amazon | Barnes and Noble | IndieBound

Inspiration behind the Heaven’s Pond trilogy

by Laura Libricz

On May 23, 1618, Protestant noblemen threw four Catholic lords out of a Prague Castle office window. The Catholic lords survived, supposedly having fallen into a dung heap. This year, four hundred years later, historians are celebrating the anniversary of that incident called the Defenestration of Prague, considered to be the beginning of the Thirty Years War. Deemed a war between the Catholics and the Protestants, all of those involved suffered torment and agony. One third of the German population succumbed during the war. They died either on the battle field, were murdered as innocents or perished from resulting diseases and hunger. 

For centuries, reformers had been known to protest the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church, their worldly rule and abuse of power and money. In the early 1400’s, the preacher Jan Hus from Prague spoke out openly against the church and its decadence. Bohemian aristocracy supported Hus, even after he was excommunicated. Although he had their support, he was executed in 1415, burned at the stake by the German king Sigismund. 

One hundred years later, Martin Luther set out to reform the Catholic Church as well. He was not intending to create a new one. The famed story reads that he nailed a document called the 95 Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517. The main points of the Theses disputed and condemned the practice of the church selling indulgences to people in order to insure their souls’ entrance to heaven. This famous incident is credited to be the birth of Protestantism. Last year, 2017 marked the 500-year anniversary of that famous incident.

Guest Post: Drawing Inspiration from the Women Who Lived through the Third Reich by C.F. Yetmen, author of What is Forgiven

Please join me in welcoming C.F. Yetmen to Let Them Read Books! C.F. is celebrating the release of the second book in the Anna Klein series, What is Forgiven, and she's here today with a guest post about her real-life inspiration. Read on and grab the first book in the series, The Roses Underneath, for 99-cents!

The Anna Klein series

Wading through the suspicion, corruption, and uncertainty of 1945 Germany, Anna Klein clings to the hope for normalcy and returning to her pre-war life. But when her job as a translator for Monuments Man Captain Henry Cooper lands her in the position to right wartime wrongs, Anna realizes her future holds a much greater purpose.

What is Forgiven

At the end of 1945 in a shattered Germany, Anna Klein is faced with tough choices about her future. Her plum job working as a translator for Captain Henry Cooper, one of the American Monuments Men, means she has a house and an income, as well as hands-on access to some of the world’s most precious art. But her life is falling apart on all fronts: her family is displaced, the boy in her care is being sought by authorities, and she must resolve to finally end her marriage. When she realizes that someone has tampered with two important paintings taken from a Jewish collector—paintings she was charged with safeguarding—Anna is determined to solve the crime. But without hard evidence and no motive, she can prove nothing and as State Department big wigs threaten to shut down the Monument Men’s operation, she and her boss are under special scrutiny. As all signs begin to point to an inconvenient suspect in the crime, she must play it by the book to keep her job and return the art to its rightful owner, if she can find him.

Drawing Inspiration from the Women Who lived through the Third Reich 

by C.F. Yetmen

In 1945, my grandmother was a 28-year-old German woman with a five-year-old daughter. She was displaced, separated from her husband and her entire family, homeless, and destitute. Meanwhile, also in 1945, the US Army Monuments Men (officially the US Army Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Division) had in their possession the most valuable art collection, probably in the history of the world.

The idea for the Anna Klein series came to me when my interest in my grandmother’s real-life story converged with my interest in the Monuments Men’s race to save art during the war.

World War II is the most studied and storied of all wars, but there is very little information on what ordinary German women went through. How do they care for their kids, get food, keep their families safe, and deal with the necessities of life? What do ordinary women do to survive the horror of a war like the ones the Nazis waged on Europe? We know more and more about the stolen art from that time but still so little about the women who lived through the experience of the Third Reich.

My grandmother died in 1998 and only shared small snippets of that time with me. Like many of her generation, she wouldn’t talk about it. When I was researching The Roses Underneath, the first book in the series, my mother very gently introduced the subject with the few of my grandmother’s friends who are still living. At that point in 2010, some 70 years removed, they were ready to speak with me. Sitting in comfortable living rooms sipping coffee from pretty cups, they told me horrifying stories that gave me nightmares. Stories of small acts of courage and unspeakable loss, of terror and devastation. And surviving.

The story of Anna Klein unfolded from there. I hope Anna grew into one of those sweet, old ladies like the ones I knew. They were survivors who were able to recapture some meaning and beauty in the life that came after.

The kindle edition of the first book in the trilogy, The Roses Underneath, is currently on sale for 99-cents!

Amazon  ~  Goodreads  ~ C.F. Yetmen's website

About the Author:

C.F. YETMEN is the author of The Roses Underneath, which received the 2015 IPPY Gold Medal for Historical Fiction, was named a 2014 Notable Indie Book by the Shelf Unbound Writing Competition, and was a 2014 Finalist in the  Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Visit www.cfyetmen.com.

Blog Tour Review: The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck

From the Back Cover:

Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold

Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined—an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding.

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.

First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.

As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges.

Written with the devastating emotional power of The Nightingale, Sarah’s Key, and The Light Between Oceans, Jessica Shattuck’s evocative and utterly enthralling novel offers a fresh perspective on one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Combining piercing social insight and vivid historical atmosphere, The Women in the Castle is a dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake of unimaginable hardship.

My Thoughts:

The Women in the Castle opens with a prologue in which Germany's academic elite have gathered in celebration, and we are introduced to Marianne von Lingenfels and the von Lingenfels castle, a charming relic that has been used only for annual parties but that will soon become a refuge and a lifeline for the wives of the men sequestered in Albrecht von Lingenfels's study plotting the downfall of Adolph Hitler. Seven years and one failed assassination attempt later, World War II has just ended, and Marianne, now a traitor's widow, makes it her mission to find the wives and children of her husband's co-conspirators, heroes in her eyes, and bring them to safety.

Though she is only able to find two, Ania, a woman she'd never met, and Benita, the young wife of Marianne's childhood best friend, she gathers them and their children and brings them to the castle, where she hopes to keep them safe in the dangerous post-war climate, and where she hopes they will all be able to rebuild their lives together. None of these women have been untouched by the war, although Marianne, as a wealthy member of the aristocracy, has not had to suffer the physical depravities or face the daily fight for survival that the others have, and she soon realizes that coaxing these women into forming a new family with her will not be as easy as she'd hoped. Through food shortages, illness, the Russian and US occupations, and the bands of discharged soldiers and former prisoners roaming the countryside, Marianne desperately attempts to hold them all together, but she is eventually forced to admit that she can't force her fellow survivors to follow her path, that she must let them each come to terms with the war and their roles in it in their own way, and that they must each determine their own future.

Blog Tour Guest Post: The Munich Girl by Phyllis Edgerly Ring

Please join me in welcoming author Phyllis Edgerly Ring to Let Them Read Books! Phyllis is touring the blogosphere with her historical fiction novel The Munich Girl, and I'm thrilled to have her here today with a guest post about how Eva Braun and the human experience inspired her to write The Munich Girl.

Anna Dahlberg grew up eating dinner under her father’s war-trophy portrait of Eva Braun. Fifty years after the war, she discovers what he never did—that her mother and Hitler’s mistress were friends. The secret surfaces with a mysterious monogrammed handkerchief, and a man, Hannes Ritter, whose Third-Reich family history is entwined with her own.

As Anna learns more about the “ordinary” Munich girl who became a tyrant’s lover, and her mother’s confidante, she retraces a friendship that began when two lonely teenagers forged a bond that endured through the war, though the men they loved had opposing ambitions. Anna finds her every belief about right and wrong challenged as she realizes that she has suppressed her own life in much the way Hitler’s mistress did. Ultimately she and Hannes discover how the love in one friendship echoes on in two families until it unites them at last.

The Legacies That Outlast War

by Phyllis Ring

During my years as a U.S. military brat in the 1960s, my first friends were German families. Then I married another brat who’d also spent part of his childhood in Germany, and we began returning there as often as we could. I realized that if I wanted to understand this culture I love (as I struggled to relearn its language), I needed to understand more about Germany’s experience during the war.

Never could I have imagined how quickly that intention would take me straight to Hitler’s living room. Within the week, I received a copy of British writer Angela Lambert’s biography of Eva Braun. Then a combination of entirely unexpected circumstances led to my owning the portrait of Braun that began to unwind the sequence of events in my novel, The Munich Girl.

A major turning point in the story’s development occurred when I discovered, while researching the Trials at Nuremberg, that an action of Eva Braun's in the last week of her life saved the lives of about 35,000 Allied prisoners of war. Two members of my British mother's family were among them.

Blog Tour Review: The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth

From the Back Cover:

Dortchen Wild fell in love with Wilhelm Grimm the first time she saw him.

Growing up in the small German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel in early Nineteenth century, Dortchen Wild is irresistibly drawn to the boy next door, the young and handsome fairy tale scholar Wilhelm Grimm. 

It is a time of War, tyranny and terror. Napoleon Bonaparte wants to conquer all of Europe, and Hessen-Cassel is one of the first kingdoms to fall. Forced to live under oppressive French rule, the Grimm brothers decide to save old tales that had once been told by the firesides of houses grand and small all over the land.

Dortchen knows many beautiful old stories, such as 'Hansel and Gretel', 'The Frog King' and 'Six Swans'. As she tells them to Wilhelm, their love blossoms. Yet the Grimm family is desperately poor, and Dortchen's father has other plans for his daughter. Marriage is an impossible dream.

Dortchen can only hope that happy endings are not just the stuff of fairy tales.

My Thoughts:

I'd been waiting for so long to read this book, and it hooked me from page one. In fact, the prologue had me itching to turn to the last page to see how it ended, but I resisted! The story has an enchanting fairy-tale quality from the very beginning as we meet young Dortchen Wild, a precocious, starry-eyed, imaginative girl who revels in the beauty of nature and the transcendent quality of folk tales. The fifth of six girls born to a frail mother and an overbearing father, hers is not a life of ease, but she sees the good in everything and determines to make the most of what life has to offer her.

She becomes fast friends with Lotte, the only girl out of six children in the Grimm family, who has just moved into the house across the alley, and begins to spend all of her free time with the poor yet loving family. Secretly worshiping the scholarly Wilhelm, the second oldest brother, she endeavors to help him and the oldest, Jakob, as they compile a collection of old tales in the hopes of finding fame and fortune with its publication. Dortchen shines under their attention, surrounded by a circle of friends sharing stories and laughter, even though her generous nature in wanting to help her poor neighbors often lands her in trouble with her father.

Spotlight: The Fairytale Keeper by Andrea Cefalo

Please join Author Andrea Cefalo as she tours with Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours for The Fairytale Keeper, from February 16-March 13. Take the Fairytale Keeper Playbuzz quiz and enter to win a Fairytale Keeper Clutch Purse and $25 Amazon Gift Card!

Re-Release Date: February 1, 2015
Scarlet Primrose Press
Formats: eBook; Paperback
Pages: 262
Series: Book One, Fairytale Keeper
Genre: Young Adult/Historical/Fairytale Retelling



Adelaide’s mother, Katrina, was the finest storyteller in all of Airsbach, a borough in the great city of Cologne, but she left one story untold, that of her daughter, that of Snow White. Snow White was a pet name Adelaide’s mother had given her. It was a name Adelaide hated, until now. Now, she would give anything to hear her mother say it once more. 

A rampant fever claimed Adelaide’s mother just like a thousand others in Cologne where the people die without last rites and the dead are dumped in a vast pit outside the city walls. In an effort to save Katrina’s soul, Adelaide’s father obtains a secret funeral for his wife by bribing the parish priest, Father Soren.

Soren commits an unforgivable atrocity, pushing Adelaide toward vengeance. When Adelaide realizes that the corruption in Cologne reaches far beyond Soren, the cost of settling scores quickly escalates. Avenging the mother she lost may cost Adelaide everything she has left: her father, her friends, her first love, and maybe even her life.

Seamlessly weaving historical events and Grimm’s fairy tales into a tale of corruption and devotion, The Fairytale Keeper, leaves the reader wondering where fact ends and fiction begins. The novel paints Medieval Cologne accurately and vividly. The story develops a set of dynamic characters, casting the famous villains, heroes, and damsels of Grimm’s fairy tales into believable medieval lives. Though historically set, The Fairytale Keeper brims with timeless themes of love, loyalty, and the struggle for justice.

Praise for The Fairytale Keeper

“A…resonant tale set late in the 13th century… with unexpected plot twists. An engaging story of revenge.” –Publisher’s Weekly

“Great historical fiction. Strong emotion injected into almost every page.” –Amazon Vine Reviewer 

“…a unique twist on the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Part fairy tale retelling, part historical fiction… The Fairytale Keeper is a story of corruption.” -Copperfield Historical Fiction Review