2025~35. City of Thieves

David Benioff. 2008.

In many ways this is a traditional masculine war novel. It is set in Leningrad during World War II, but I am not sure that I got the sense that the narrative was true to that era.  To be fair, I know very little about the Russian front in WWII, but there was something about significant pieces of the plot that seemed unlikely to be true and to a large extent it felt like another example of "historical fiction" that imports model progressive values into historical scenarios that I am not at all sure that people experienced at the time and that just feels like a erasure of actual historical experiences. 

​Here, it is a young woman posing as a boy and a Jewish boy pretending to be a soldier, both "hiding in plain sight," who just happen to come into contact again and again by people who step up to protect him that felt too much like a story about how many saviors there were in a time and place where we know that these types of heroes were few and far between.  The chances that they would come into contact with this many just ignores how unusual that probably would have been. And there were just so many little examples of this, like the way sex workers are treated with so much respect and compassion by the protagonist solider and his friend also felt so unlikely that I couldn't get into the story. There was something not just about the substance of these interactions, but the voice that just did not feel congruent with other writing from and about that era that I spent the entire book thinking about whether the book was researched and historical accurate and not about the actual story itself.  I found it distracting for this reason and just couldn't get into it. 

Not recommended.
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