The Goddess of Warsaw

I LOVED this book. I loved Lisa Barr’s last book (Woman on Fire) and this was just as good. Like, A+, texted my mom that she had to read it, still can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t read a ton of historical fiction but could not put this down. It is a perfect mashup of old Hollywood glamour with WWII Nazi drama. In 2005, we meet Lena Browning, a mysterious but enormously famous movie star. The book opens with a young starlet (Sienna Hayes), wanting to direct a picture about Lena’s life. But Lena’s past is murky. She is not actually Lena Browning at all. She’s Bina Blonski; a wealthy Jewish woman who was imprisoned in a horrible ghetto with the rest of Warsaw’s surviving Jews. Bina is not one to just suffer silently, she vows to fight back and joins an underground resistance movement. As her family is destroyed, Bina does the unthinkable for a woman of her standing: she becomes a spy, gaining information and stealing weapons outside of the ghetto. What she accomplishes is truly heroic. Meanwhile, her personal life is in a terrible state; she is in love with her husband’s brother (a fellow resistance fighter) Aleksander. Bina manages to eventually escape, and makes her way to Hollywood where she becomes a star. She becomes powerful and famous but can never really escape her past. I loved this and could not put it down. There were so many twists and turns; I gasped at the end! Highly, highly recommend.