This post is a part of the Book Beginnings and Friday 56 blog memes. Visit more of my All About Books posts.
Fiction
Quick comment: This was another in my quest to find stories built around World War 2. Glad I investigated this one,even if some of the Kindle paragraphs seemed unbearably long. Good story from an angle I've not read before, and in a country in which I hadn't come across as the setting.
Book Beginnings: Look upon them and you would die. You would turn to stone, or they would shoot you. She hated them, but that was all she could do. Only hate. And above all, not let it show if she wanted to survive. She walked meekly beside her companion and kept her mouth shut.
Friday 56: At night she couldn’t sleep. Behind her closed eyelids, she would see bits and pieces of stage scenery sailing through the air as she had witnessed that time in November, when a siren had caught her by surprise in the city center. She had ducked into a shelter, and once the shocks subsided, she climbed back up the stairs, emerging into a blinding, sunlit afternoon, in which, in addition to ash from the fresh demolition, thousands of multicolored scraps of paper were raining down.
Nonfiction
Quick comment: This book was going to be up to great things, I thought, after the first few lines. But there were too many cliches and too many places where the next sentence didn't seem necessary. Haven't yet decided if I'm going to give Ms. Leigh another try.
Book Beginnings: Darkness. Tessa had been afraid of it most of her life. For as long as she could remember, she’d gone to bed dreading nightfall, looking under the bed, double- checking her nightlight. As if a lightbulb the size of a lit match could possibly banish her nightmares. But tonight, she prayed for the blackest of nights. For the moon to stay hidden behind the shifting clouds. For the shadows to make her invisible.
Friday 56: Soon, Sophie would be too old for naps. Like her sisters, she would outgrow rereadings of Goodnight Moon and the need to have her toast cut into perfectly even triangles. Morgan was going to miss these small, peaceful bits of time. She pushed back at the creep of sadness. Life didn’t stand still. She was moving forward.
