Lisa Barr's World War II-set historical fiction follows a Jewish resistance fighter and spy through the Warsaw Ghetto to her second act as a Hollywood movie star, linking the story's two timelines and revealing long-held secrets and mysteries.
Survival is about secrets, about extraordinary measures taken to stay alive. If you survived, it means others did not. The trauma of a second chance at life, a second act, is at once miraculous and unendurable.
In Lisa Barr's newest historical fiction, The Goddess of Warsaw, the author tells a story in two timelines.
In 1943 Warsaw, socialite Bina Blonski is imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto with her husband and thousands of her fellow Jewish citizens. She becomes a spy and begins to resist against the Nazis--but when she falls for another resistance fighter (her brother-in-law), things get even more complicated.
In 2005 Los Angeles, Sienna Hayes is a Hollywood actress looking to direct. When she meets Golden Age movie star Lena Browning, she becomes determined to make a documentary about Lena's life. But Lena is actually Bina--and her life has been far more complex than almost anyone knows.
Some moments felt overly dramatic--as with Bina's frequently explored obsession with her brother-in-law Aleksander (and her unwise diary entries concerning her passion for him), as well as when Bina immediately inserts herself into the resistance as a key player--but these elements paled against the intrigue of the story.
The details of World War II and of resistance to the Nazis are heartstopping, and I was hooked on each of the two timelines in this interconnected story. I loved that brave women that drive the novel in both timelines.
I received a prepublication edition of this title courtesy of Harper Perrenial and NetGalley.
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Lisa Barr is also the author of Woman on Fire, The Unbreakables, and Fugitive Colors.