I had no idea that things were so desperately bleak in Poland during WWII- obviously I knew it was no picnic, but this was eye opening, without a doubt. The women characters are strong but secondary, and they range from a middle-aged resistance fighting nurse to two young and beautiful soldiers/partisans.

Traitor | Amanda McCrina - Macmillan

I wrote one linear narrative, I wrote a separate linear narrative, and then I went back and kind of manipulated them. Stories that start with an action scene, like in this story, and bombardment of names that most of the English speaking people won’t be able to pronounce is not something I connect with. At one point I ended up putting the book down to read the history of the city of Lwów on Wikipedia, which to me is a sign that the key players in the book weren't well explained.

He crossed the tracks and crouched for a little while on the embankment, catching his breath and waiting and watching. The question for reflection later was whether Tolya would still have done it—presented with Zampolit Petrov’s back and no witnesses—if not for the girl. That said, the world the author weaves is darkly fascinating and we learn a lot about a part of the war that is often glossed over- one that is messy without clear heroes and villains. Only after he’d put that first bullet in the small of the zampolit’s back did Tolya recognize the olive-drab jacket with the smart red collar tabs.

Traitor - Macmillan

Personally, my biggest issue was keeping track of all the characters and their different sides (German? I think that’s important to me: knowing what young people—especially in my community—want to read, what kind of things are they looking for? No] matter how dark and bleak our circumstances are, there are always people who are willing to stand up and do the right thing. I would very much like to think Solovey and Tolya existed in some shape or form, somewhere in the past, that they breathed and lived and loved, that they led lives they were proud of in a time when life wasn’t precious or even really life. All that to say, Tolya is stuck in this world, between all these worlds and all the hate and all the machinations.I have tried to read this book in three different sittings, but clearly this book just isn't for me. I think the dual POV really worked well too, which kept up the tension and my developing interest in the story. There's also no pronunciation guide for any of the Polish or Ukrainian words, which I really would've liked. I've studied Eastern European history a bit and still found it hard to keep track of what was happening in the book. That was how his father had died (not in the Brygidki, but in a Soviet prison just the same), and that was what his father’s sentence had said because his father had been Ukrainian and a Soviet citizen.

Traitor: A Novel of World War II - Common Sense Media

Bestselling author Elizabeth Wein describes Traitor as a piercing and bittersweet story of unflinching loyalty, and that is precisely what it is. There was a lone sentry in the ruined train shed, sitting on the edge of the platform, swinging his legs and smoking makhorka. In fact, I gave this book to my dad who is always on the lookout for WWII books, and is always very excited to connect to his familial Polish roots. With her COMPELLING prose McCrina plants seeds that will continue growing long after the final page. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work for a book that toggles back and forth between two different young men living in two different periods of World War II, 1941 and 1944.

The exploration of this complicated ethnic identity becomes one of the threads woven through the book in a world where Poles and Ukrainians are engaging in ethnic warfare and Tolya is caught between two worlds. The setting is one I knew pretty much nothing about - the action takes place in the city of Lviv, which was then in Poland, and is now in Ukraine. Usually historical fiction is not the type of book that I would go for but I had entered the contest for this particular book for my daughter who loves WW2 and that time era.