Review: "The Betrayal" by Helen Dunmore

From Goodreads: Leningrad in 1952: a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young hospital doctor and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of sixteen year old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their private happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights. When Andrei has to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, Volkov, he finds himself and his family caught in an impossible game of life and death - for in a land ruled by whispers and watchfulness, betrayal can come from those closest to you.

My Thoughts: This book is the sequel to The Siege which I read a few months ago. I feel like I haven't read much historical fiction lately and this book made me see how I much I have missed it. The Betrayal picks up 10 years after The Siege and continues to follow Anna, Andrei and Kolya as they try to survive and thrive in Stalinist Russia. I think Ms. Dunmore did an amazing job of portraying what life was like for the average person during this time and the book is very well-written. I was pretty sure going into this book how it would end and I was right but I'm not upset about it. Rather than create the perfect happy ending, Dunmore's ending was real. That's not to say that the ending was bad but it was realistic and showed what happened to people during that era. I never cease to be shocked by how incredibly messed up life in Stalinist Russia was and reading this book made me excited to get back to reading books about this era. 4 stars.

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Happy Sunday everybody! September is over and I can hardly believe it. It seems as though the month has flown by. Now I'm excited for fall and all of the upcoming holidays. October is the start of my favorite time of year and I'm hoping there will be plenty of room for reading in between all of the upcoming events. I requested some new holiday books from the library and had no idea all of my holds would come in at once so I need to get moving on these. I'm really excited to dig into some sweet, fluffy reads and these will do just the trick. From the Library: A Snow Country Christmas by Linda Lael Miller This is the fourth book in a series that I really enjoyed so I'm eager to get started on it. Holly and Ivy by Fern Michaels The Christmas Room by Catherine Anderson I was so intrigued by the cover on this one that I had to pick it up. For Review (from NetGalley): I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon I really need to st

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