Amherst Island #6
If these children could heal, shouldn’t Rosie be able to as well? What made her grief so strong that it kept her from trying again, from learning to live, to really live, and to love once more?
1945, England: When Rosie Lyman travels to the Lake District as a volunteer to help children rescued from the horror of the concentration camps after the Second World War, she hopes that by caring for the young orphans, she can distract herself from the loss of the man she loves and her beloved daughter.
From the moment the children arrive, Rosie is rushed off her feet as she welcomes the new arrivals. But when she notices one particularly quiet girl, who has isolated herself from the other children, Rosie senses a wealth of sadness inside Frieda similar to her own and becomes determined to help her.
As she struggles to connect with the young girl, Rosie meets one of the adults traveling with the children, Leon Rosenblat. And although they don’t always see eye to eye, as they begin to care for the orphans, Rosie senses a warmth within him, and soon finds herself thinking about his kind smile, dark hair and glittering brown eyes…
But as time passes, Rosie finds her own grief harder to contain. And as she watches Frieda and the other children begin to heal, she realises she must face her own heartbreak and loss. Is Rosie brave enough to share her story? And, if she is, will she finally be able to trust her heart once more?
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Extract
from chapter one
Over the course of the last month, Rosie had been advised by several of the staff, many of them pre-war refugees from Germany themselves, to expect the children to be both malnourished and traumatized, potentially terrified or maybe even aggressive, mute or wild. No one quite knew how the children might have had to change or adapt in order to survive the unimaginable experience of life in the camps, what terrors and tragedies they might have seen or endured, and what scars, emotional and physical, they might now have to bear. The newspapers could hardly show the full horror of such an experience, although what Rosie had already read seemed too terrible to be true, and yet it was. All the world was reeling from what had been discovered in the far reaches of Poland, as well as throughout Germany—a system of concentration and extermination camps that dealt in the most grievous of suffering, torture, abuse, and outright murder, to those the Nazis had deemed unfit for society, or even to live. Some of the Jewish refugee volunteers here had had some experience of their home country under Hitler’s reign of terror, while Rosie felt utterly in the dark about it all, gleaning what she knew only from the sparing facts in the newspapers, or on radio programs. Before meeting Marie Paneth at the end of the war in the East End of London, she didn’t think she had ever laid an eye on a Jewish person in her whole life. She didn’t speak German; she wasn’t a therapist or a doctor. A month on, she was still wondering whether she belonged here at all, although Marie had insisted she could make herself useful, and Rosie was determined to do so. She needed to feel useful and busy, craving a distraction from the emptiness at the center of her own life, the deep well of grief she skated away from, in the uneasy quiet of her own mind. Besides, she acknowledged, what had been the alternative? To find passage on one of the military transports taking demobbed military personnel back to Canada, to go home and pick up the tattered remnants of her life as if she’d never left at all? Her parents didn’t even know all she’d experienced, whom she’d lost, the dreams that had been so wonderfully woven and then broken. How could she tell them now, when she could hardly bear to remember the details herself?
Thank you
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About the author
Kate Hewitt is the author of many romance and women’s fiction novels. A former New Yorker and now an American ex-pat, she lives in a small town on the Welsh border with her husband, five children, and their overly affectionate Golden Retriever. Whatever the genre, she enjoys telling stories that tackle real issues and touch people’s lives.
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Author Links
https://www.kate-hewitt.com/
https://www.facebook.com/KateHewittAuthor/
https://twitter.com/katehewitt1
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Book Link
Amazon: https://geni.us/B0BYK85HQZsocial
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B for Bookreview 