Thanks so much to NetGalley, the publisher and author for the opportunity to read this book.
For all the books I've read concerning the horrors of the Holocaust, you'd think you couldn't be surprised by atrocities but of course you're wrong. This story basically incorporates two true happenings of that time and combines them into an amazing novel - infants rounded up and put on a train car headed for concentration camps and the German circus that helped to hide Jewish people.
Noa is a young Dutch girl, pregnant from one night with a Nazi soldier, and forced to leave her home by her father. She goes to a home where she is forced to give up her baby boy - in yet another program to take young German babies and give them homes. When her baby doesn't look like the German ideal, she has no clue what will happen to him. She is forced to try and earn a living cleaning and sleeping in a railway station. She happens to hear faint crying one night and sees the horror of a whole train carful of infants, most dead or dying. Without thinking, she grabs one little boy who is alive and takes off running through the woods. She is found by circus workers and taken in by the owner. In order to stay, she must learn the trapeze, and her tutor is more than reluctant to teach her. Astrid has her own secrets - and being saddled trying to teach Noa makes her angry, which she takes out on Noa.
This is an amazing story of hope, despair, love, survival - all in the horrid shadow of the war. I am not a big circus fan but just as in Water for Elephants, there is something that draws you closer. I thought the writing was wonderful - highly recommended.
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