Wow, I’m so glad I decided to dive into a Thea Beckman book again. As a kid I loved Crusade in Jeans, but somehow I’d never read any of her other works. This surprised me in the best way. Now I remember why I used to love reading books like these. I devoured Jan Terlouw and Simone van der Vlugt books in my youth and this falls into the same category. I listened to the Dutch audiobook and it is sublimely narrated. I mainly read in English but there’s just something about reading/listening books in your own language. Although the language and use of words was a little old fashioned at times (this was written in the 90’s) this didn’t bother me at all. When this was written we didn’t really have “YA” books yet, but I guess that’s what we would call this today. Even though the writing style seems to be aimed at younger readers (middle grade/early ya), the themes in the book are of a very adult nature. I loved learning about a period in history that I knew essentially nothing about and I definitely wanna read more. I had some difficulty remembering all the names and titles and who fought for which side, especially towards the end. That’s why I enjoyed the first half of the book better and it took me a while to get through the second half which is much denser. Still, I really enjoyed this.

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