Sisterhood of Reading

The War Orphan- Anna Stuart

Rating- 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩
Format- Ebook
Genre- Historical Fiction

I had the opportunity to receive an arc copy of this book from NetGalley and author, Anna Stuart. I am so glad that I received this arc because this book was phenomenal.

When the book starts, Natasha ‘Tasha’ Ancel is sixteen years old. She and her mother, Lydia, are the only remaining survivors of their family. In Auschwitz, Tasha’s mother is taken away on the March and Tasha stays behind. She meets a boy named Georg who is also alone and they survive Auschwitz together.

After Auschwitz was liberated, Georg and Tasha stick together. There is a group of orphan refugees that I being set over to England to recover from the war and Georg is eager to go. Tasha doesn’t want to because she doesn’t consider herself and orphan. She knows her mother is out there and she needs to find her. She ends up going to England with Georg.

Alice is a caretaker who was able to find refuge in England at the beginning of the war. She didn’t want to leave behind her brother and his family but she had no choice. She hasn’t heard from them at all, even after the war. She doesn’t give up looking for him. During the war she took care of children who were either orphans or whose families couldn’t care for them. Georg and Tasha find themselves in the care of Alice. Tasha has a hard time moving forward because she can’t let go of her mother. Georg wants her to move on, to marry him and have babies but Tasha can’t move on yet. She needs to know what happened to her mother after they were separated. It takes years, but Tasha, Georg, and Alice finally get the answers they are looking for.

I could not stop crying while reading this book. It was so beautifully written and so heartbreaking. Anna Stuart really does a beautiful job portraying each of the characters and the struggles that they face in the aftermath of WW2. Alice was by far my favorite character. It is people like Alice that bring light to the world when everything seems hopeless. In the end, family is what you make it. Each of the characters has known devastating loss that will always be part of them, but they find love and a future with each other. I was amazed that a lot of the characters, including Alice, were based on real people. These people were heroes. This was a 5-star read and I recommend this book to everyone.