I got this book for free using netgalley but I promise all opinions are my very own! 
The Woman with the Blue Star
ISBN: 0778389383
by Pam Jenoff
Format: eARC
Published by Park Row on May 4, 2021
Pages: 336
Source: netgalley
Goodreads 
1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amid the horrors of the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous sewers beneath the city. One day Sadie looks up through a grate and sees a girl about her own age buying flowers.
Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. Scorned by her friends and longing for her fiancé, who has gone off to war, Ella wanders Kraków restlessly. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it’s a girl hiding.
Ella begins to aid Sadie and the two become close, but as the dangers of the war worsen, their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds. Inspired by harrowing true stories, The Woman with the Blue Star is an emotional testament to the power of friendship and the extraordinary strength of the human will to survive.
It is going to be really hard to review this book and not just force it on everyone I meet. Historical Fiction has always been a hit or miss for me, but The Woman With a Blue star was a great big hit. It is now on a list of books that are contending for my top 10 for 2021. I really love to pick out 10 for 2021.
I have to admit that I thought Krackow was the Polish name for Warsaw for the whole book. It is not. Once I did see that Krakow was a whole different city, things started to make a lot more sense. Such as the sewer open up near the river…I was like, what river?? Then I looked at a polish map and…felt kind of stupid, but there you go. It is never too late to learn stuff.
I couldn’t imagine how horrible the circumstances were in that they felt that the sewer tunnels were the best place to hide until they could get out of the city. As long as the German had control, German soldiers would shoot every Jew on sight. There was this one scene that really drove home about how bad it was under the Germans. The Germans found a Jewish woman and tried to arrest her, but when she saw she was cornered, she took her two kids and jumped in a river that most likely killed all of them. If a mother jumped, you know that it had to be equally bad if mothers thought the best course of action was to jump to their death.
This book also shows the power of friendships even when all the odds are stacked against them. I know many friends, and even I sometimes feel as everything is absolutely 100 percent a time. We think that if something or someone was evil, then there was no good in them. A Woman with the Blue Stars shows how many things exist in a morally grey area… I love to watch how Ella and Sadie’s friendship grew even though they were worlds apart. As e see things determining in Poland and how the Germans were flushing every Jew out into the camps, we also can see where love and friendship blossoms.
And yes, I said love. I am not going to say more than that, but after reading the book and knowing what I am talking about, feel free to hit me up. Needless to say, I was blown away when I read that. It is not often that I get the shock of reading things. I can usually tell what will happen because their author follows a trope, and most of them I have seen/read millions of times. Then there is The Woman With the Blue Star type books where the author comes up with a fresh way of seeing things, so when you are reading the Epilogue, it is so out there you spend all day making sure you read it correctly.
All in all, I LOVED this book. I loved it so much that I found Pam Jenoff’s backlist and will be working my way through them!
