A big thank you to Penguin Group and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this YA book about a young girl caught up in trying to prevent the creation of a bomb like the world has never seen. A half-Jewish girl in Nazi Germany passes up a chance to escape in favor of the opportunity to screw with Nazis. I enjoyed Clementine's part of the book. Sarah, having her own troubles, starts to understand what others are going through because of Clementine. The whole novel felt electric, and had a very presence that I haven't had from a book in this genre for a good while ( The Color of Secrets and Susanna Kearsley are two that come to mind). The first book we read as part of this book club was Orphan, Monster, Spy by Matt Killeen. I was instantly attracted to this story because it is set during the war; I’m fascinated by stories set in war time and always have been. What’s more, this particular story is set in Germany during the Second World War, so it comes from another perspective.

The action in this book was also incredibly wild since it really felt like I was watching everything unfold from the big screen. It did get a little gory after some of the situations but I think those scenes added to the dire setting Sarah was in. Nothing felt too unrealistic since --- while I was reading --- I kept realizing that Sarah was only 15, which sometimes baffled me since I couldn’t imagine being that strong at that age. It just goes to show how desperate those times were and how you really needed to protect yourself to survive. I think that overall Killeen did a great job of transferring the readers into the environment which really made me feel like I was in the late ‘30s, making the read all the more exciting. A fast-paced journey that will leave anyone wanting more. Topped with witty writing and a boatload of action, this book leaves me extremely ecstatic for more work from Matt Killeen..." Through Sarah’s fictional adventures I want to illuminate this time and make it real for the reader. I want them to understand that history, to interrogate it and then question the events of today. Nobody should ever say ‘this couldn’t happen now’ because it can and it does. As the philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” When it comes to Devil, Darling, Spy I must confess the first book in the series was a better fit for me. That withstanding this is by no means a bad book. We still get a rip-roaring adventure to sink our teeth into. This time transplanting the story from Germany to Africa. I think maybe it for me is starting to become a lot more Bond-like in its style of narrative. Whereas the first one was much more about Sarah trying to survive this book looks at her taking control of her own destiny. I would say she is much more confidant in her self but this also leads to her taking risks that could have much great repercussions. There seems to be this interesting mix of James bond, Inglourious bastards happing here being mixed with just enough historical events to keep it feeling grounded. Being a massive WWII buff who spent a fair amount of time studying this horrendous time of war, I have to appreciate the amount of effort that Killeen has gone through to capture the darkness of this time period, the ferocity of this war and the grim casualties that happen along the way. And as much as people think that this book is dark and doesn’t reflect the war correctly, I ask you to keep in mind that there was a German camp that used to skin their victims with tattoos and these were turned into gloves and lampshades. So it’s best to keep in mind that in times of war, nothing is too dark and nothing is out of the question when it comes of the human’s nasty capability.Speaking of characters, Sarah was definitely one of my favorites. She was headstrong and intelligent and it was so wonderful reading from her perspective. She wasn’t afraid to stand up for her friends and even herself which was something I really admired. She had amazing character development from the beginning of the novel and by the end, she morphed into this confident heroine who could take on anything thrown at her. El libro en sí, me gustó ¿Tuve problemas para terminarlo? Sí; pero no porque me hubiese parecido malo, sino que por momentos se extendía a cosas que no eran relevantes a la trama y eran de puro relleno, por ende, aburrían. Yo creo que lo más destacable de esta historia, es sin lugar a duda la protagonista. Sarah es una chica de quince años que creció demasiado rápido, una chica afectada por la guerra, pero nunca tanto como para arruinar su espíritu. Es una chica que tiene miedo, pero nunca deja que la paralice; es una chica que sabe lo que quiere, pero nunca se olvida de mostrar compasión, y sobre todo, es una chica a la que la vida le pegó mil patadas, pero nunca se rindió. Me parece que Sarah podría ser un gran rol para niñas que están en plena etapa madurativa, por eso, creo yo, que ese es el público ideal para este libro. Sarah is a Jewish girl who loses her mother right at the start of the story when they are attempting to escape to Austria. Her mother was an alcoholic, once an actor and performer, but who found herself without a husband, when he left them, and struggling to look after her daughter when she was unable to work. I grew up in a decade obsessed with the Second World War. It seemed to dominate the books, comics, TV, playground games…everything. However, my mother’s best friend was German and after many sparkly, golden summers with her wonderful, warm and rabidly pacifist family, I found myself unable to swallow the idea that Germans were the war-mad, evil monsters depicted. Yet the more I learned of the Holocaust, the less sense any of this made, as I increasingly identified with its victims. I was an endlessly bullied child, in an era when bullying was considered the fault of the victim by the adults who were supposedly there to protect me. Thus began a lifelong appalled and horrified fascination with the Third Reich, its crimes and the war fought to defeat it. For the most part, the writing is strong. However, whilst it’s clear and relatively fast-paced, the internal dialogue is intrusive and repetitive - the constant reminders of Sarah’s Jewishness in particular. Sure, she must be hyperconscious of the fact, but I as a reader have already grasped that given the historical context. Killeen is clearly intelligent, and this makes the peppering of clunky German phrases and terrible action scenes harder to bear.

In this book you can see two warring personalities coming out. The first being that she is a young girl. She isnt confident, she realises she could die. All she wants is to be loved, held. She latches on to the first person that shows her this. She spends a lot of time basically forgetting to keep her secrets, and starts believing that she is too young for this. In questo gioco è finita Sarah, la protagonista del primo libro di questo autore, La bambina di Hitler (qui la mia recensione https://www.romanticamentefantasy.it/...). Najlepsza powieść młodzieżowa 2018, która zachwyci także dorosłych, bez dwóch zdań – „Sierota, Bestia, Szpieg” Matta Killeena.

La historia es bonita, a pesar de lo cruel de las situaciones a las que se enfrenta Sarah siendo tan pequeña. A su vez es sorprendente lo bien que relata la soledad y autonomía a la que se enfrenta el personaje, ya que a pesar de tener al Capitán, el mismo no cubre la figura paterna o de un familiar que le hace falta a Sarah, sino lo he visto casi más como un amigo-adulto. Se observa en la novela la crueldad de la Alemania nazi en su día a día, con una cuidadosa precisión en los detalles, ya que contamos con varios personajes muy observadores. Right now, history is repeating. The very things for which the teenagers who confronted the Third Reich sacrificed so much are under threat. Resistance has never been so important. I hope that the readers of Orphan Monster Spy will part of that. Two years ago now I read the first in this series Orphan, Monster, Spy it was a book that I really enjoyed. For me, It took all those elements of historical fiction novels about world war to and mashed them with a sort of James Bond-like quality. It was a great adventure book that you could get lost in with all the danger and peril you would expect to find in a book about a Jewish girl becoming a spy in Nazi Germany. So now we come to Devil, Darling, Spy which came out at the beginning of this year. Which I have to admit I missed the release of until now. But upon finding out about it of course I was going to jump right in. Sarah feels she must win a brutal cross-country race, which spans a fast running river and miles of woods. She uses the power of memory of Kristallnacht—the injustice of what was done to Jews—to fuel her ability to cross over the canopy of trees, which spans the river, rather than the regular route over the bridge. Is this cheating? In a world so brutal a little cheating is easily forgiven. If she can defuse the process of bomb-making by reporting secrets to Herr Haller, the free world might be saved—she hopes. Big stakes. And it’s all told in a believable manner.