Svetlana's Reads and Views

Name of Book: Wunderland Author: Jennifer Cody Epstein ISBN: 978-0-525-57690-7 Publisher: Crown Type of book: 1930s to 1989, dual timeline, Germany, life as Mischling, friendship, family, relationships, secrets, life post WW2, America, living, estrangement Year it was published: 2019 Summary: East Village, 1989 Things had never been easy between Ava Fisher and her estranged mother Ilse. Too many questions hovered between them: Who was Ava's father? Where had Ilse been during the war? Why had she left her only child in a German orphanage during the war's final months? But now Ilse's ashes have arrived from Germany, and with them, a trove of unsent letters addressed to someone else unknown to Ava: Renate Bauer, a childhood friend. As her mother's letters unfurl a dark past, Ava spirals deep into the shocking history of a woman she never truly knew. Berlin, 1933 As the Nazi party tightens its grip on the city, Ilse and Renate find their friendship und...

Name of Book: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment Author: Jennifer Cody Epstein ISBN: 978-0-393-33531-6 Publisher: Norton Type of book: Japan, 1935, 1942, 1943, 1945, 1962, six degrees separation, secrets, romance, America, Manchuria, Western-educated Japanese, bombing of Tokyo, history, WWII Year it was published: 2013 Summary: A lush, exquisitely rendered meditation on war, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment tells the story of several families, American and Japanese, their loves and infidelities, their dreams and losses, and how they are all connected by one of the most devastating acts of war in human history. In this evocative and thrilling epic novel, fifteen-year-old Yoshi Kobayashi, child of Japan’s New Empire, daughter of an ardent expansionist and a mother with a haunting past, is on her way home on a March night when American bombers shower her city with napalm—an attack that leaves one hundred thousand dead within hours and half the city in ashen ruins. In th...