Traitor: A Novel of World War II

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If you miss curfew again, I’ll shoot you myself, and to hell with the zampolit. I’ll tell Comrade Colonel Sokolov it was an accidental discharge.” Don’t flatter yourself, Comrade. He was mine. And if you were worried about being safe, maybe you shouldn’t have shot your own officer.” The structure is fascinating! Two teenage soldiers cross paths, and alternating sections of the book are written from each young man's perspective. As a writer, I tend to be attracted to characters who have both internal and external conflict going on. And for me, the easiest way to do that is to write a character who represents two different sides or two conflicting identities. So Tolya, my main character, is representative of the whole conflict in the novel [because he is] both Polish and Ukrainian. He’s a microcosm of this conflict that runs throughout the novel. So his identity crisis is the same identity crisis [that runs] through the book.

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One of the main characters, and the first that we follow, is 17-year-old Tolya who has been conscripted into the Soviet Red Army, hiding the fact that he is half-Polish, half-Ukrainian. The exploration of this complicated ethnic identity becomes one of the threads woven through the book in a world where Poles and Ukrainians are engaging in ethnic warfare and Tolya is caught between two worlds. Not to mention an array of splintered factions and resistance groups, double-agents, differing priorities, and outside influences. It's messy, not the neat and clean narrative of the Western heroes versus the evil Nazi's. But I think it's a story worth telling and one we can learn from. Mrs. Kijek was one of my heroes. Honestly, Solovey was one, too. As for Tolya and Mykola, they both broke my heart. (My sister told me she had nightmares about poor little Mykola.) For me, the most grasping stories start with an interesting character and then injection of history, once you’re attached to the character. Stories that start with an action scene, like in this story, and bombardment of names that most of the English speaking people won’t be able to pronounce is not something I connect with. I need character development first. What remained, besides the rifle, was that Zampolit Petrov was dead, bleeding into two red puddles on the sidewalk. Second: I got confused with the various organizations and countries involved. Polish and Ukrainians hate each other, but only because of the Russians and Germans....? I think? And I couldn’t remember which organization was with which country. And to add to THAT confusion, like half the characters we met were all traitors. One was UPA but really NKVD. One was pretending to be Soviet but was really NKVD also? At least two or three were UPA or not UPA or soviet but not really soviet.Fans of Wein’s Code Name Verity won’t want to miss this powerful story about the desperate actions we take in the name of loyalty and survival.” — The Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books Everyone believes that Salil Singh killed his girlfriend, Andrea Bell, five years ago—except Pippa Fitz-Amobi.

Traitor: A Novel of World War II eBook : McCrina, Amanda

A piercing and bittersweet story of unflinching loyalty. I think Tolya has left my heart a little damaged forever.” —Elizabeth Wein, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Code Name Verity and The Enigma GameFinally, the book is crying out for a sequel! It doesn't end on an awful cliffhanger, but I really wanted to know what would happen next. The dangerous city of Ketterdam is governed by the Merchant Council, but in reality, large sectors of the city are given over to gangs who run the gambling dens and brothels. The underworld's rising star is 17-year-old Kaz Brekker, known as Dirtyhands for his brutal amorality. Kaz walks with chronic pain from an old injury, but that doesn't stop him from utterly destroying any rivals. When a councilman offers him an unimaginable reward to rescue a kidnapped foreign chemist—30 million kruge!—Kaz knows just the team he needs to assemble. There's Inej, an itinerant acrobat captured by slavers and sold to a brothel, now a spy for Kaz; the Grisha Nina, with the magical ability to calm and heal; Matthias the zealot, hunter of Grishas and caught in a hopeless spiral of love and vengeance with Nina; Wylan, the privileged boy with an engineer's skills; and Jesper, a sharpshooter who keeps flirting with Wylan. Bardugo broadens the universe she created in the Grisha Trilogy, sending her protagonists around countries that resemble post-Renaissance northern Europe, where technology develops in concert with the magic that's both coveted and despised. It’s a highly successful venture, leaving enough open questions to cause readers to eagerly await Volume 2. Traitor is a compelling look at what was, to me, a lesser-known part of World War II. In Traitor, we follow two young men who find themselves ensnared in quite the dire battle. I will say before you go any further, this is a fairly brutal novel, which obviously makes sense given the subject matter. But it doesn't shy away from some really violent stuff, so keep that in mind. I’m gonna chalk this up as a “it’s not you, it’s me” scenario. Because by all rights this should’ve been a great book—it starts off fast and doesn’t let up. It’s a compelling historical fiction about a time period/battle I don’t know much about. Then a betrayal sends them both on the run. And in a city where loyalty comes second to self-preservation, a traitor can be an enemy or a savior—or sometimes both.