City of Thieves
This is a historical fiction book that takes place during the siege of Leningrad during World War 2. The story follows Lev, a 17 year old Jew who was arrested for looting, and Koyla, a 20-something Russian deserter, on their attempt to find a dozen eggs to be pardoned for their crimes.
Historical fiction isn’t usually my genre especially if it is WW2 related, but I really enjoyed this book and how it looked at things outside of what we talk about during school (somehow my classes decided to ignore Russia when talking about WW2, seriously my history education was lacking). The book is both truly funny and horrifying at the same time. Benioff’s language has a detached quality that allows the reader to fill in a lot of the horror of the situation while giving you the “facts”, he’s telling you the horrible things that are going on but not in a way that is pulling at your heart strings. At the same time you get this strange friendship between Lev and Koyla which is really fun to read. Also there’s a bad ass lady in here. The reason that this book didn’t get 5 stars from me was that a section of this book got a bit to fictitious and spelled out, which was in contrast to the things I loved about the rest of the book.
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