Fabulous Fiction Firsts #628, Parts 1 & 2

REVIEW WRITTEN WORD


"If you are here today ... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it through hell and are still standing? We bear a different name: warriors.” ~Lori Goodwin.

Fabulous Fiction Firsts #628, Pt.1

Two extraordinary debut novels set during WWII came out on Valentine's Day, and both speak to the capacity of the human spirit to endure in the face of the 20th century’s darkest moment.

We Were the Lucky Ones is based on the true story of the Kurc family of Radom, Poland. In 1939, prosperous and educated, Jewish merchants Sol and Nechuma were trying their best to live normal lives with their family as war was looming, observing religious holidays and doting on their new grandchild. When Germany invaded Poland, Sol and Nechuma decided to stay with daughters Halina and Mila, while their sons Genek and Jakob joined the Polish army.

Middle son Addy, an engineer and budding composer was stuck in France and was eventually conscripted. Over the course of the war, the three generations of Kurcs were flung to distant points on the globe, from the jazz clubs of Paris to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to Kraków’s most brutal prison and the farthest reaches of the Siberian gulag, they were driven by an extraordinary will to survive and to reunite.

Debut novelist Georgia Hunter first learned that her beloved grandfather Eddy (Addy in the novel) came from a family of Holocaust survivors as a result of a high school English project "to dig up pieces of our ancestral pasts" (Author's Note). Through oral history interviews with her grandmother, a memorable Kurc Family reunion on Martha's Vineyard, and a decade of research, thorough and precise in its details, "Hunter sidesteps hollow sentimentality and nihilism, revealing instead the beautiful complexity and ambiguity of life in this extraordinarily moving tale." (Publishers' Weekly)

Read-alikes: City of Women by David Gillham; Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly; and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.


Fabulous Fiction Firsts #628, Pt. 2

Former book editor Jennifer Ryan's charming debut Chilbury Ladies' Choir takes us to a small village in Kent during the spring and summer of 1940.

With the men off to war, the vicar disbanded the church choir until the newly arrived Miss Prim(rose)Trent, a worldly, take-no-prisoner university music professor, challenged the women to form an all-female choir.

Over the course of six months, through letters and journals, we watch as these women continued to cope with the fall-out of war, scrimmage over village affairs, and struggle with matters of life and death, while the choir brought them together, sustained them in their darkest hour, and took them to great heights, far beyond their expectations.

Widowed Mrs. Tilling is resentful having to billet Colonel Mallard in her son David's room, only to find love when she least expects it; Edwina Paltry, a scheming midwife with a sinister plan and a shady past, is determined to cash in on other people's misfortunes, come hell or high water; 19-year-old Venetia Winthrop, wild and impulsive, is courting trouble by seducing a dashing artist who might very well be a spy; a 13-year-old accomplished First Soprano, Kitty Winthrop, plucky and fearless, finds solace in her music while navigating the grown-up world and her first heartbreak. Silvie, a young Czech refugee, taken in by the Winthrops, is anxious about the state of her homeland and the fate of her family.

For fans of Mary Ann Shaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society ; and Home Fires, a PBS period television series based on the book by Julie Summers. Television rights to Chilbury Ladies' Choir have been optioned by Carnival TV, the production company behind PBS' Downton Abbey.

Related:
Fabulous Fiction Firsts, full archive