They Went Left

Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to eighteen-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has barely begun to heal; her mind feels broken. And her life is completely shattered: Three years ago, she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else--her parents, her grandmother, radiant Aunt Maja--they went left.
Zofia's last words to her brother were a promise: Abek to Zofia, A to Z. When I find you again, we will fill our alphabet. Now her journey to fulfill that vow takes her through Poland and Germany, and into a displaced persons camp where everyone she meets is trying to piece together a future from a painful past: Miriam, desperately searching for the twin she was separated from after they survived medical experimentation. Breine, a former heiress, who now longs only for a simple wedding with her new fiancé. And Josef, who guards his past behind a wall of secrets, and is beautiful and strange and magnetic all at once.
But the deeper Zofia digs, the more impossible her search seems. How can she find one boy in a sea of the missing? In the rubble of a broken continent, Zofia must delve into a mystery whose answers could break her--or help her rebuild her world.

Many thanks to the Fantastic Flying Book Club and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for an eARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review and for including me on this blog tour. Quotes are taken from an unfinished version and may differ from the final product.

I knew I had to read this book the minute I finished that synopsis.

And can you blame me? Okay, first, I am absolute trash for any book that takes place during World War II, because apparently I hate myself and love watching my feels wither and crumble until I’m a mere husk of a person. But second … this takes place after the war, which is such a novel idea.

They Went Left is a poignant, heartwrenching exploration into how one carries on living when everything has been taken from them. It’ll unapologetically destroy your feels on one page, and give you something to hope for on the next.

This one’s a hard book to review, for several reasons. Since the narrator is an unreliable one, this story has to be experienced, because there are so many ways to potentially step in spoilers here. It’s also not a light book by any means, but it is what I would call uplifting, despite everything.

The author’s note mentions all the research the author did, including pulling real first names from the Holocaust registries, pulling snippets of details from first-hand accounts of what life was like both during and after the war, and I think that really comes through in this book. Even though it is a work of fiction, it’s a stark reminder that these things really happened to real people.

❧ Rather than focusing on the concentration camps, like so much historical fiction set during World War II, Hesse explores the aftermath of the war.

And wow have I wanted this for a long time and felt like it was so overdue. Because the war didn’t just end and everyone went about their way and that was that. Of course not. Yet, it seems there’s a major focus during the war, and then people are sort of forgotten afterwards. V-E Day and liberation wasn’t just an ending … it was also a beginning.

Hesse doesn’t shy away from the hard-hitting emotions that still crop up: the obvious PTSD, the nightmares, the little remnants of life in a concentration camp that are hard to shake.

I loved everything about this approach, because picking up the pieces in the aftermath is still hard. It’s not like flipping a switch, and I think it’s easy to forget that. There were so many poignant scenes where Zofia had a flashback to a camp. More than just the emotions, though, the reality for the survivors is bleak, a lot of times. They’ve lost homes and sometimes entire families and sometimes themselves, too, and where do you go from there? This was such a stark, much needed reminder of the effects of wars and atrocities and the way they perpetuate long after they officially “end.”

❧ Zofia is a brilliant example of an unintentionally unreliable narrator, as she struggles with memory gaps and PTSD.

Her brain is fuzzy, in a way. She knows the information’s there, but she can’t always access it when she wants to, and sometimes it pops up unbidden. Mostly, she’s suffering from severe PTSD, which had laid her up in the hospital, as she struggled to maintain a grip on reality. She doesn’t mean to be an unreliable narrator, but her brain refuses to cooperate and sometimes withholds information and sometimes gets caught in an information loop.

Zofia’s arc is a wonderful one, as she goes from someone with a tenuous grasp on reality to a woman who would do anything to find her brother, whatever it takes.

Really, even though her skin is thin and mottled with scars and reminders that it never had before, she’s growing back into it, back into herself, and it was such a beautiful transformation. She’s relearning what it means to be Zofia, and it was so powerful to read.

❧ At the heart of this book is a really touching tale of sibling bonds, and gosh how I love this trope.

Especially given the dark, grim backdrop of World War II and concentration camps, it means that much more to have this sort of sibling bond. The sort that transcends pretty much everything else. That would have a sister throwing caution to the wind to find her brother, against all odds.

Zofia promised Abek she would find him. The only problem is she doesn’t remember the last time she saw him, and she doesn’t know where to look, but she knows that she won’t be able to move forward with life until she’s reunited with her brother.

I love sibling books, and this is a sibling book with a twist. Admittedly, I saw the twist coming pretty early on, which I feel is more a testament to my deduction skills and the author’s foreshadowing skills, so it didn’t come as a major shock to me. I loved it anyway, though. The story of these siblings both broke my heart and gave me hope, and that’s pretty much the theme of this whole dang book.

❧ There’s little shadows of a romance in this that made my heart absolutely melt … and then callously yanked it out and stomped all over it.

And I can’t even be mad. I tried. Gosh, how I tried, because the nerve of some authors! Making me feel and then … making me feel more? But in a bad way? Feelings are hard enough as it is, and they shouldn’t be this complicated, okay?

First, it’s amazing that they can find romance and live and love again so soon after everything, and it’s not without reservations. But as one woman says (paraphrasing, of course), you have to take the joy that’s in front of you. It’s very much a “carpe diem” sort of mantra, which allowed for some really sweet moments in between everything else.

I won’t say too much about the romance, but I do appreciate how it was handled. There’s often a desire to view romance through rose glasses, and this wasn’t it. This was tentative and unsure, paying homage to the scars (mental, physical, and emotional) that all the characters went through. It’s fragile, and it’s beautiful, and it’s for sure not always easy, which made me appreciate it more.

❧ Despite the dark cloud overhanging the book, there’s surprising levity and joy filling the pages.

The sort that sneaks you up and catches you completely off-guard with its absurdity, because how can people possibly go through so much and still come out the other end and laugh? How can they hurt so, feel so utterly broken, and yet find a sort of quiet joy in the things we take for granted? Yet, they do. Over and over again.

At their core, people want to be happy, and what this book does especially well is not only remind us of that, but show how these characters reclaim little bits of joy in quotidien things.

It’s like rediscovering themselves, because for so long, these characters weren’t allowed to just be themselves. For Zofia, it’s picking up a needle again and something as simple as mending some clothes. For many of them, it’s just finding camaraderie among people who understand and who went through the same sorts of things. This story isn’t inherently funny, but it is about learning to laugh again, even if it felt like you never would again.

About Monica Hesse

Monica Hesse is the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in the Blue Coat, American Fire, and The War Outside, as well as a columnist at The Washington Post writing about gender and its impact on society. She lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband and their dog.

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Click here to see the full tour schedule and all tour-related information.

April 8th
The Unofficial Addiction Book Fan Club (Welcome Post)

April 9th
Popthebutterfly Reads (Review)
Bookishly Nerdy (Review + Favourite Quotes)
Beckybookstore (Review)

April 10th
Jill’s Book Blog (Review)
Willow Writes And Reads (Review + Playlist)
Devourbookswithdana (Revivew)
Kait Plus Books (Promotional Post)

April 11th
Pages Below the Vaulted Sky (Review)
dinipandareads (Review)
100 Pages A Day (Review)
Confessions of a YA Reader (Promotional Post)

April 12th
Sometimes Leelynn Reads (Review + Playlist)
The Writerly Way (Review)
Booksinverse (Review + Playlist)

April 13th
Books Over Everything (Review)
Hooked on Bookz (Review)
Book Nook Bits (Review)
A Dream Within A Dream (Promotional Post)

April 14th
For The Love of Fictional Worlds (Review)
Books_andPoetrii (Review + Playlist)
BoundbyWords (Review)

Win (1) of (2) copies of THEY WENT LEFT by Monica Hesse (US Only)

April 8, 2020 – April 22, 2020

Have you read any other World War II books set in the aftermath of the war? Hook me up with some recommendations!