"High as the Heavens" Book Review

Oh I barely got out of the starting blocks with this one. The first few pages were filled with such overly poetic writing that it almost turned me away. Glad I stuck with it though because shortly after, it seemed like the author, Kate Breslin, stopped trying to be dramatic and got on with writing a good story. And that she did. The plot was a good one. This is a story of a nurse forced to live in enemy occupied Belgium during WW1.

The main character, Eve Marche, not only works as a spy for the resistance, she also goes to great lengths to save the life of a downed British pilot. In addition, Eve has to work through trauma and guilt she's been carrying due to horrific events that occurred near the start of the war. Some parts of the book seemed slightly implausible but not so much that it made me roll my eyes or anything. I thoroughly enjoyed reading how our heroine was going to implement the next part of her daring plan.

I thought the author did a good job of painting a picture of how hard it would have been to live under those conditions. My own grandmother was an Italian immigrant who lived through WW2. Decades later my sister had two young German men come to visit and my grandmother could barely be in the same room with them or hear them speak. All she said was, "It brings back too many memories." What horrors did she live through that would affect her 50 years later like that?  The same as many others.

My only criticism of "High as the Heavens" was that I felt like I was reading the same words over and over again on a number of pages. Eve couldn't leave because of her family and her spy work and the pilot couldn't stay because of danger. The plot kept moving forward but it just felt like the author was telling us what the characters were thinking and they were thinking the same thing all the time. Having said that, while I knew everything was going to be fine in the end because this is a romance novel, the author did lead us on quite an adventure.  I also loved that the love between the two main characters was not based on her looks or some lusty passionate feelings. I wanted to clap as I read of people choosing to do the hard thing for the sake of the other.

A good read.

"Book has been provided courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications, Inc."