France, 1937. It only takes a single snowstorm for Lina Fontaine's family to fall apart. When an accident in the snow kills her brother and renders her speechless, Lina and her family move to Marseilles, France in order to escape the painful memories. Disillusioned and disgusted with her new reality, Lina yearns to hide away from the world. Yet when her father abandons them and threatens to take her beloved sister with him, Lina realizes she can no longer ignore her own struggles. It is only when Lina meets Luka Fuhrmann, a German-Jewish pianist with a mysterious past, that she begins to have hope again. At the same bookstore she encounters him, she receives a book with a letter tucked between the pages, written by a father pleading for help to find his missing daughter. When she learns there is a monetary reward, Lina realizes this may be the key to saving her own family. Yet as Lina becomes obsessed with finding the missing girl and spends more and more time with Luka, she finds her frequent absences may only be destroying her crumbling family further. And when Lina's plan ends up endangering her sister as well as Luka, Lina is forced to decipher what is most important: her family, the boy she loves, or her own desires.

It started on a night with broken glass. First the glass, then the screams, and then the blood. And then, their lives were changed forever. It marked the beginning of her brother's suffering. As Else Schüffen struggles to define everything that is happening around her in Germany 1941, Maximilian faces a different kind of struggle. An adopted Jew in a Christian family, Max faces betrayal and loss, forgiveness and anger. Being a divided family with a Nazi as a brother, his fears become a reality. He must go into hiding, but with a different identity: Henrik Brandenburg, an Aryan shopkeeper. And then there's Else, a young Aryan girl, in the midst of her brother's tumult. Painting, it seems, is the only way of escape, and the only way to keep her brother, Maximilian, in her heart forever. Through it all, there is one thing she learns. Sometimes, in order to survive, we must repair our broken wings and learn to fly again~ #39 in historical fiction//March 29th Edited by the lovely @jgfairytales

London, 1950s. Rose Kovachi wants nothing more than to forget. She wants to forget the war, the concentration camps, the mysterious violin her brother gave to her before he died. She wants to forget her poverty-stricken family, her Romani heritage. But most of all, she wants to forget her future and the expectations that come with it, including finding a respectable job or a husband to provide for her family. When she meets Ruben Faust, an upper-class German who recognizes her beloved Pedrazzini violin, Rose realizes he might be her ticket to escape. Despite her prejudices and her irritation with his nonchalant and snarky demeanor, she decides to follow him across Europe as they search for the violin's original owner. After all, it seems like the perfect opportunity to leave her own family and her pre-planned future behind. But as Rose is forced to confront her painful past, she begins to realize running away might not be so easy. She soon discovers that Ruben is in far more trouble than she ever thought and that her family is falling apart in her absence. Rose is determined to save them and get what she wants, for it seems the only way to forgive herself for failing to save her brother from the war. Yet Rose soon realizes that she can't have it both ways. But was scares her the most is the fear that nothing she does will ever be able to repair the past.

(Currently Editing) Poland, 1942. When Celina Rudaski took the evening train to Warsaw, she did not expect to return responsible for the lives of two Jews. Then again, she did not expect her father to be whisked away in the middle of the night by soldiers, nor did she expect her house to become swallowed by flames of fiery hatred. Yet it all happened in the matter of twenty-four hours. A stubborn, introverted fifteen year old girl, Celina refuses to believe the many stories of the horrific genocide against the Jews, often turning a blind eye to anything that reminds her of the war. But when she unwittingly promises to hide two Jews in a home she does not have, Celina must journey across Europe with these strangers in search of lady who might be able to rescue them. They are filthy, they are broken, and Celina cannot seem to control the hatred burning inside her. Together they travel town to town, witnessing each cities own branch of horrors, even hiding in basements of strangers. In ways painfully unimaginable to Celina, these two Jews affect her life in the deepest of ways. As they dodge bullets, stumble upon an injured enemy pilot, and attempt to escape the hands of the Germans naming them fugitives, Celina must learn to face what she has been too terrified of her entire life. ***Edited by the lovely @jgfairytales

Crippled streets. A silent whisper. Broken beams of light. Her eyes saw it all. The despair; the brokenness of her world. With only her father's hand shielding it all from her. The year is 1948, rubble and collapsed houses littering the streets of Northern France. Marietta, struck with amnesia, remembers nothing from the war. Not her identity, not her experiences, not her family. All she sees is the present, overcome with a cloud of darkness as France slowly struggles to rebuild everything it had before. When her curious mind leads her to the attic, her life is changed in an instant. A broken beam of light reveals a box, filled with photographs. Photographs of her past, of her family, of memories that she can't remember. Slowly the truth begins to trickle out, Marietta slowly crushed with it. As she struggles to find who she really is, and to grasp everything that has happened to her, Marietta begins to find a light. A light that she must learn to follow. [slow updates]