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There are currently 16 member reviews
for Resistance
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Catherine (Aurora CO)
Great Book!
Resistance is one of the best books I have read in the past year. Its premise is, what if Germany had won World War II and occupied Great Britain. At first, I thought, interesting but I'm not really into books about war. I read the first few pages, a little slow, hoped I would be able to finish it. Next thing I knew, I was on page 75! Then I had a hard time putting it down. The story is told from many points of view, so you truly are left wondering, who is the bad guy and who is the good guy. Would definitely recommend it for book clubs, men, and women.
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Julie (West Hartford CT)
Thoughtful and provocative
This beautifully written story focuses on a town of women deserted by the men in their lives who have joined the British Resistance during WWII. The women's fragile relationship with the occupying Germans, and their growing mutual dependency is both sensitive and thoughtfully developed. The language is wonderful, the story flows smoothly, and the characters are real.
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Judy (Marysville OH)
Imagining what-if and a poet's eye
This book will stay with me for a long time. It's beautifully written and emotionally powerful. Set in a remote and mystically beautiful landscape removed from the immediate physical horrors of war, Sheers reveals the inevitable human pain, loss, and moral lose/lose dilemmas that descend even on the most isolated people.
This alternative history story is based on the author's fascination with what he learned from a real-life participant in the British resistance organization about the secret plans for fighting against a German invasion. The story takes place from Fall of 1944, when Germany has invaded the south of England, to mid-1945, when London and most of the country have been overtaken, though there is no official British surrender.
Six women living on the only farms in a remote valley in Wales are suffering from the desertion of their men who have all secretly and silently disappeared in the night to participate, the women decide, in the British resistance organization planned in 1940. When six German Wehrmacht soldiers on a mysterious mission arrive and take up residence in the valley, a tense, anxious dance begins between the soldiers and the women, who draw together and shrink apart, until the reality of the war invades the valley and shatters the uneasy dance in surprising and heartbreaking ways.
The landscape of this human drama is echoed in the universal, elemental balance between the land and the people it sustains. Owen Sheers' poet's eye gives a striking view of this landscape. For a small example, who can resist this word picture describing two of the characters walking together "... disturb[ing] skylarks from their nests and ... watch[ing] as the startled birds ascended above them, disappearing up the threads of their song."
For me, this book matches the power and depth of Pat Barker's World War I trilogy--Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road--though it's very different.
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Rebecca (Knoxville TN)
Resistance
Resistance was a beautifully written book which, while correctly called a historical novel, was also a novel of great suspense as enormous tension builds throughout the story. Set in a remote Welsh valley during WWII, Resistance is the story of five women left on their own by their husbands. A group of five German soldiers appear in the valley looking for a lost treasure and slowly build relationships with the five women who begin to see the men as men and sons and friends rather than as the enemy. Enjoy!
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Dorothy (Maynard MA)
Resistance is an exceptional book
Using the resistance plans the British put in place during WWII, author Owen Sheers has imagined a world in which they were necessary, telling the story of a tiny farming community in Wales. The writing is wonderful, places and people drawn in such honesty and beauty that you sense they are with you. The story of people coping with a world they did not create and cannot control, reminded me of The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. Don't miss this one.
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Sally (Murfreesboro TN)
Resistance
Don't let the alternate history setting fool you; it is merely a backdrop for a novel about timeless human issues concerning war and finding the humanity in others who are unlike ourselves. The writing is wonderfully descriptive, especially of the setting, and I recommend this book. Book clubs would find many areas of discussion.
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Diana (Boca Raton FL)
A Moving Account
As with the telling of any story of an alternative history, the risk is becoming too fantastic or implausible. Resistance takes us to a world where Germany has indeed won the second World War, and drops us into a landscape so barren and foreign, it’s as though World War II occurred 150 years ago, instead of 60. The book succeeds in many ways, not the least of which in putting a human and almost sympathetic face on the proverbial Nazi monster and shows us, right to the very end, that every action, good or bad, has a consequence.
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