It’s a sad historical fiction. It’s something that feels too true also. The story’s that intertwine are just horrifying. I felt that it was hard to read at times. The things that happened in Warsaw were so hard to hear. It’s well written but again, hard to go through the trauma repeatedly even though it’s meant to be fiction. 

Thank you to Edelweiss, Graydon House, & HarperCollins for the opportunity to read and review this book before it's publication date! This in no way affected my review, opinions are my own.

Another absolutely stunning WWII Historical Fiction novel by Kelly Rimmer - after The Things We Cannot Say I thought she would probably be an auto-buy for me in this genre but now there's no doubt!

(Also, because I haven't seen this in many reviews, this book is a companion novel of sorts to The Things We Cannot Say, which was another absolutely brilliant book by the author. Warsaw Orphan can be read as a stand-alone, but I definitely recommend reading both.)

This book is a haunting and incredible look inside both the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the larger Warsaw Uprising of 1944, told from the perspectives of a Jewish teenager who lived in the Ghetto with his family before the Uprising and a Catholic Pole simultaneously hiding from the Germans for her own protection while secretly working alongside Polish Social Workers to smuggle Jewish children out of the Ghetto (based on Irena Sendler's wartime activities, I believe). 

One of the things I particularly liked about this book was having the POV of Roman, the Jewish teenager living inside the Ghetto. I feel like I rarely read men's POV in the WWII books that I read, and he was written so brilliantly. I loved his character almost as much as Elzbieta (Emilia, Tomasz's little sister from TTWCS). The slow build of their relationship, and the difficulties they faced in both the world around them and their own temperaments, was so unbelievably good. 

This was not an easy book to read, by any means - but I think it's an important one to read. And it's well researched, well written, and a skillfully carried out story - add this to your TBR as soon as you can.