Pam Jenoff

When they discover a Jewish Allied paratrooper stranded outside of their small mountain village in Poland, 18-year-old twin sisters Helena and Ruth Nowak hide him from the Nazis, but soon jealousy and a devastating betrayal set in motion events that will reverberate across the decades. Original.

The Winter Guest

Angela Guilherme

*I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

The story begins in 2013, in the USA, where an old lady who has just moved into an assisted living residency gets a knock at the door and is given the news that bones were found in an abandoned chapel in Biekowice, Poland, her home town.

From there we go back to 1940 Nazi occupied Poland, where the Nowak twins are forced to assure their survival and the survival of their younger siblings, Michal, Dorie and Karolina, after the death of their father and the hospitalization of their mother. Poor and with no source of income, they try to survive as they can, in a time when the occupation meant scarcity for everyone.

Even though they are twins, Helena and Ruth are completely different. Ruth is more feminine so she was always considered the pretty twin and she assumes the role of mother, taking care of the house and of the younger siblings. Helena is pragmatic and has always helped their father so she handles the manual work, as well as the dangerous task of making the weekly trip to Krakow to visit their mother, hospitalized at the Jewish hospital because it was the only one they could afford.

And it is on one of her weekly trips to the city that Helena discovers a wounded soldier and, even though she knows she is putting herself and her siblings in danger, she’s incapable of not helping him, so she takes him to an abandoned chapel where she starts to visit him frequently, nursing and feeding him back to health. The soldier is Sam, an American Jewish who was incapable of staying home and doing nothing knowing the atrocities that were being committed by the Nazis against his people.

As they spend time together and get to know each other, the feelings between them turn to love and Helena decides to try to find a contact in the city that is capable of saving Sam and take him and her family to the USA. And here was where I had my main problem with the story because I thought that Helena’s approach of the contact was too fast and too easy to be believable. I mean, seriously, she didn't really know the city that well, she didn't really know where she was supposed to go but, all of a sudden, the person she was trying to find finds her?

But the changes in Helena don’t go unnoticed to Ruth, who finally leaves the world of illusion she had been taking refuge in since the family’s life changed and she was deprecated by her suitor who, after her father died and her mother was hospitalized, didn't want to assume the responsibility of taking care of all of her siblings. And when she discovers about Sam, the jealousy and resentment because he prefers Helena and not her, the pretty sister, motivate her to do a series of betrayals that will hopelessly change the destiny of them all.

Generally, I liked the story and the characters, especially Helena and Sam, and the evolution of their love story, branded by secrecy and fear, but also by hope, even when it seems impossible to hope. The only character I didn't like was Ruth, because she was shallow and jealous, and I can’t really say I regret what happened to her.

The author has more historical fiction books published and I would like to read them and to see them published in Portugal.

The Winter Guest

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