A very heartfelt and well written look at both the difficulty refugee French Jews escaping WW2 faced, and the difficult choices mothers had to make and literally war with during that time. All during the book I kept asking myself what choice I would make if I hadn’t known how the war ended, and I can’t say I actually know, proving how insurmountable that choice would have been for those mothers.

I also love how the authors note at the end personalizes the mothering aspect of it and how she related. I felt that in her explanation and it further identified the story for me.

Such a great sorry of Maryam Grace, how she struggled not only in slavery and being stolen from her country in Africa, but in her time around the Caribbean with pirates. It showed the expected atrocity of slavery and the sorrow and defeat that brought, but also how love could be found in the midst of it. And it showed the determination and strength she and so many other slaves had despite the horrific experiences they endured.

There were times the writing got a little wordy and I had to go back and reread the sentences because it lost me a bit, but overall it was a great book with a unique story line.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Great suspense and new character development for Nena and her family. There were some things that weren’t hard to figure out and some that I felt like she should have seen coming with her experience but overall I enjoyed it a lot and it was well written.

It’s wasn’t particularly mysterious or thrilling, was just kind of ok. There was so much revealed so early on, it was really just sort of small details you didn’t know about till the very end. Overall it was really mostly disturbing and gruesome by the end of it, but not in a plot twist sort of way, more in an ick sort of way.

Another really great book by Sally Hepworth. As always you’re second guessing what’s really going on - who’s really the bad guy and who is just misunderstood. Really well done.

Loved the characters and their flaws and strengths, and how they all dealt with their own mental health struggles while trying to make sense of their family tensions and find the truth. Ms Hepworth did a great job of fleshing out how trauma can affect you and how important working thru things, talking about them and not hiding them can be. Admittedly at times some of the gaslighting was difficult for me to read, so fair warning if this is a trigger point for any readers who also have some experience with it. It’s pretty well played out and authentically done.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was an odd book - it combined a ww2 setting with Jewish mysticism and magic. The story was good and had a lot of beautiful imagery along with the struggle of most ww2 stories. The magic/fantasy was odd but I didn’t hate it - it was well done without being overboard - I just had to separate it a little from the “reality” and compartmentalize it.

Totally engrossing and lovely. Loved both main characters of Philly and Arthur in this one.

Philly’s bravery and compassion was so endearing and I liked and respected her immensely. The grace that she gave everyone around her but not to the point of being a pushover, had you wanting to be her friend.

And she balanced well with how Arthur’s character was patient and full of integrity and a desire to protect. Also liked the fact that it wasn’t a fight or difficulty between the two like it often us with stories that start on a marriage of convenience. Bonus was the suspense in it as well - really well done and so very hard to put down.

I really struggled with this book. I have read Ms Chiaverini's book "Resistance Women", also a fictionalized version of real people and events, and absolutely loved it, so I was expecting much of the same with this. However, "The Women's March" was mostly a narrative of facts and events, with very small bits of dialogue scattered in, making it read more like a nonfiction history book or a biography of the 3 women featured. It didn't feel at all like a fiction book. I'm not really sure what was fictionalized but it seemed to be trying to have a foot in both worlds instead of doing either really well.

Fiction is supposed to allow you to step into the characters' worlds, while being laced with emotion and dialogue, feeling what they are feeling while walking with them in their story. This, however, had very little emotion, and felt like you were outside looking in, watching events as they happened instead of being invited into them. This was almost a DNF for me, except that I know very little about women's suffrage and felt it was an important story to hear nonetheless, although I probably skimmed most of the second half just trying to get thru it. Bottom line, the content was important and good but if this was supposed to be a novel of fiction, it fell very flat for me and I was really disappointed with it.

Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

So fascinating to learn of little-known, courageous, and inspiring women in history. So often history has been told almost entirely with men as the heroes and focal point but I’m finding more and more books that show how much influence women have given to historical events, quite often behind the scenes but were no less influential.

I absolutely loved Ms Dray’s book My Dear Hamilton and in The Women of Chateau Lafayette, with its female-driven and heroic story, was again well done. I love how Ms Dray gives this glimpse into the incredible life of the wife of the infamous Lafayette most of all. Gosh she was amazing, wise, and inspiring and I’ve never even heard of her before this book.

I appreciated that the characters were flawed as life always is, that they struggled with their own decisions, hopes, doubts, etc, but they persevered against such intense odds at great cost to themselves for the good of others. Hopefully we will continue to unearth more female heroes, who are just as valuable and influential as their male counterparts we’ve known about for so long. Great read, and very well written.