September 1939. Overnight, Jewish nineteen-year-old Emma Bau's world is turned upside down when Germany invades Poland. And after only six weeks of marriage, her husband Jacob, a member of the Resistance, is forced to flee.
Escaping the ghetto, Emma assumes a new, Christian identity and finds work at Nazi headquarters. As secretary to the charismatic Kommandant Richwalder, Emma vows to use her unique position to gather intelligence for the Resistance, by any means necessary.
Poignant, affecting and gripping, Kommandant's Girl is the beautifully written story of one woman's struggle to survive one of the darkest periods in human history.
Audiobook
Series: The Kommandant's Girl #1
Genre: Historical Fiction
Kristine's Thoughts:
I listened to Kommandant's Girl on audibook. I decided to give it a try after listening to The Orphan's Tale and really liking it.
I enjoyed this story but I had a lot of mixed emotions as I listened to it. First of all, Emma/Anna came across as quite young and naive and I suppose she was. She was young and married only briefly before her husband had to go into hiding with the resistance. However, I did feel that there were numerous times that she put herself and others at risk without much thought during a scary and dangerous time for the Jewish population. There were many times that I got annoyed at her character.
The fact that Emma and Jacob were married only a short time and he wasn't an active part of the story made it hard to connect to their love story and see Jacob as the love of her life. When the Kommandant was introduced I could see the turn the story was going to take and I thought it was quite interesting. It was difficult to accept how easily Anna agreed to help the resistance because of what it meant that she had to do but I enjoyed the complexity of their relationship. He was the enemy and although he was partly a product of the times, he was no angel. I enjoyed the complicated relationship and the fact that Anna was developing feelings for the enemy while married to someone else. It made for some interesting reading and was the material that book clubs could spend hours discussing and dissecting.
In the end I enjoyed this story and will be reading or listening to The Diplomat's Wife next. I do feel like I would have enjoyed the book more if I read it instead of listened to it because I was not a fan of the narrator. I found her voice annoying and I think it may have affected how much I got lost in the story and my overall rating of the book.
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