Title: The Ways We HideAuthor: Kristina McMorris
Published by: Sourcebooks Landmark on Sep. 6, 2022
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 496
Format: Paperback
Source: Sourcebooks Landmark
Book Rating: 10/10
As a little girl raised amid the hardships of Michigan’s Copper Country, Fenna Vos learned to focus on her own survival. That ability sustains her even now as the Second World War rages in faraway countries. Though she performs onstage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist, behind the curtain she’s the mastermind of their act. Ultimately, controlling her surroundings and eluding traps of every kind helps her keep a lingering trauma at bay.
Yet for all her planning, Fenna doesn’t foresee being called upon by British military intelligence. Tasked with designing escape aids to thwart the Germans, MI9 seeks those with specialized skills for a war nearing its breaking point. Fenna reluctantly joins the unconventional team as an inventor. But when a test of her loyalty draws her deep into the fray, she discovers no mission is more treacherous than escaping one’s past.
Inspired by stunning true accounts, The Ways We Hide is a gripping story of love and loss, the wars we fight—on the battlefields and within ourselves—and the courage found in unexpected places.
Review:
Heart-wrenching, charged, and atmospheric!
The Ways We Hide is an absorbing, enthralling, tragic tale set during WWII that follows Fenna Vos, a young American magician who, after taking a position working in England with Christopher Hutton at MI9 inventing “escape-and-evasion gadgets” for airmen and POWS, requests to be dropped into occupied Holland to find her childhood friend and love of her life who has seemingly disappeared without a trace and believed to be a traitor and Nazi collaborator.
The prose is eloquent and polished. The characters are driven, courageous, and resilient. And the plot, including all the subplots, unravel and intertwine seamlessly into an absorbing tale of life, loss, family, tragedy, desperation, secrets, danger, friendship, magical illusions, survival, and war.
Overall, The Ways We Hide is a passionate, rich, evocative tale by McMorris that transports you to another time and place and immerses you so thoroughly into the personalities, feelings, and lives of the characters within it that you can’t help but be fully absorbed and invested. I can honestly say I devoured this novel, and it is hands down one of my favourite reads of the year!
This novel is available now.
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Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark for gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Kristina McMorris
Kristina McMorris is a New York Times bestselling author of two novellas and six novels, including the runaway bestseller Sold on a Monday. Initially inspired by her grandparents’ WWII courtship letters, her works of fiction have garnered more than twenty national literary awards. Prior to her writing career, she owned a wedding-and-event planning company until she had far surpassed her limit of YMCA and chicken dances. She also worked as a weekly TV-show host for Warner Bros. and an ABC affiliate, beginning at age nine with an Emmy Award-winning program. A graduate of Pepperdine University, she lives near Portland, Oregon, where (ironically) she’s entirely deficient of a green thumb and doesn’t own a single umbrella.
Photo courtesy of Author's Website.