Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Book Review: City of Theives

At the present, I am reading 'City of Thieves' by David Benioff. This is a very dark yet intriguing tale of a young boy in Russia during World War ll. The country is in peril as the Germans bomb them daily and their troops are gobbling up the countryside. There is no food and no fuel for heating and it is winter. Food is so scarce the people boil their books to extract the binding paste, which they turn into something called library candy.

Our young hero is caught riffling through a dead German's clothes looking for anything. He is put in jail with a Russian deserter both to be shot in the morning. Instead, they are brought before the prison commander and offered the chance to live. All they have to do is find six eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. They are given a pass and all their papers are taken away to be returned when they come back.

The dialog between the two lifts this book from its dark detail of life in hard times into almost comic relief. The soldier who is more a devil may care lover of life, women, and literature than a fighter take the lad on a tour of the country side looking for maybe the last six eggs in Russia. This is a gruesome tale showing the horrors of war at it worse and yet Mr. Benioff turns it into an adventure.

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