The only reason this book has such a high rating on Goodreads is because hardly anyone has read and possibly for good reason.

Don't get me wrong, the actual storyline of this book is good. The connection between the girls and their bouncing back from hardship is strong and inspiring but oh my god, the writing! The writing was so terrible. More so, the way conversations were structured. They lacked any surrounding detail and the reader is just suppose to know what everything looks, for example the sudden exclamation in the middle of a conversation between Elsbeth and Alice when she saw Ralph's photo. There was no description of the room, and the sudden shock of seeing her father's face peering at her. No, it went straight to, "Oh my gawd, that's my dad. Whhhaaaa?"

The way people spoke during the book was also very unrealistic and everything was very drawn out or written in accents (which I hate!). The book was slightly painful to read at times because of this.

Also, the actual plot of the book is described as Alice's quest to clear her dad's name....no! The book is all about the women and different things they did in the war and then every now and again, something about Ralph is thrown in by Alice, normally her telling someone he was innocent of the crime he was killed for.

And the obsession with rape? Rape is hard to read about once, but the amount of times it was brought up this book was unreal and it almost started to have no meaning cause it was almost like the word was being thrown about. It's certainly not the way to write it. It began to lose its sensitivity and its not an issue that should just be thrown into a plot to spice things up.