They Went Left

~ I received no compensation and opinions are 100% my own or my family. ~

Synopsis (from Amazon):  The acclaimed New York Times bestselling tour de force historical mystery from Monica Hesse, the award-winning author of Girl in the Blue Coat.

Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to eighteen-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has barely begun to heal, her mind feels broken. And her life is completely shattered: Three years ago, she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else--her parents, her grandmother, radiant Aunt Maja--they went left.

Zofia's last words to her brother were a promise: Abek to Zofia, A to Z. When I find you again, we will fill our alphabet. Now her journey to fulfill that vow takes her through Poland and Germany, and into a displaced persons camp where everyone she meets is trying to piece together a future from a painful past: Miriam, desperately searching for the twin she was separated from after they survived medical experimentation. Breine, a former heiress, who now longs only for a simple wedding with her new fiancé. And Josef, who guards his past behind a wall of secrets, and is beautiful and strange and magnetic all at once.

But the deeper Zofia digs, the more impossible her search seems. How can she find one boy in a sea of the missing? In the rubble of a broken continent, Zofia must delve into a mystery whose answers could break her--or help her rebuild her world.

One (or more) Sentence Summary:  I have read a lot of books about the Hollocust and have always been such shock afterward that it was allowed to happen.  The books stay with me for a long time.  This is the first book that I have read that starts at the end of the Hollocust and all the trama families and loved ones went through trying to renuite.  Breaks my heart and I honestly can't even begin to imagine the horror.  The Went Left is beautifully written.  You will need some tissue though. The Went Left is a young adult book but works as an adult book as well.  So well done.

I understand Monica's other books are very good too.  I need to check out Girl in the Blue Coat, The War Outside, and American Fire.

Monica Hesse is the bestselling author of Girl in the Blue Coat, American Fire, and The War Outside, as well as a columnist at The Washington Post. She lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband and their dog.

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