#BlogTour ‘The Girl I Left Behind’ by Andie Newton

About the book…

What would you risk to save your best-friend?

As a young girl, Ella never considered that those around her weren’t as they appeared. But when her childhood best friend shows Ella that you can’t always believe what you see, Ella finds herself thrown into the world of the German Resistance.

On a dark night in 1941, Claudia is taken by the Gestapo, likely never to be seen again, unless Ella can save her. With the help of the man she loves, Ella must undertake her most dangerous mission yet and infiltrate the Nazi Party.

Selling secrets isn’t an easy job. In order to find Claudia, Ella must risk not only her life, but the lives of those she cares about.

Will Ella be able to leave behind the girl of her youth and step into the shoes of another?

Huge thanks to Vicky Joss at Aria Fiction for the blogtour invite and my gifted ebook copy of ‘The Girl I Left Behind’ which is out now, go get it!

Starting in 1943 with a high tension opening act that sets the scene with mystery and intrigue, the book then rolls back the calendar 2 years to 1941 Germany and a young girl, Ella, running late for a meeting of the German Girls League-she lives with her aunt after the death of her parents and immediately the reader realoses that she, and the rest of the world, are living on a knife edge of what is an what is not acceptable behaviour.

She and her best friend Claudia are bonded by death, Ella has lost her parents and Claudia her sister who was hung as a public warning not to deviate from the set curriculum for teachers at the time. Everything has to be transparent, every move, every word has to be seen to be supporting the Nationalist way of life, nothing less than perfection and obedience will be tolerated. As well as this, there is the sense of horror where youths are being made to read ‘Mein Kampf’ and take it as their Bible, they have been brought up this way and indoctrinated so deeply into this way of life-attending the Youth League is compulsory-that they know no other way to be. So when a girl in Ella’s class starts crying over her love of Hitler, you recoil in horror but also feel terribly sad due to the brain washing that has led her to feel this way.

Ella is starting to get the idea that not all is right in Germany, she has no idea how to go about expressing this except to Claudia, as anyone could report her for not being a good citizen-even her aunt who is a fanatical socialist. Claudia introduces Ella to the German Resistance,and becomes a member of a group known as ‘The Falcons’. But when Claudia disappears and Aunt Bridget sends Ella to Munich, suddenly Ella finds that she is in a position to do something-not just to find out what happened to her friend, but also to help the Falcons via her job in the Reich . The only thing it might cost her is her life…

Full of rich detail and heartstopping moments of tension, this is a book about World War 2 unlike any I have read-the focus on the German resistance brought to life a part of the war about which I knew nothin and the historical details did not overwhelm the story, not did they get abandoned for the sake of advanicng the plot.

It is quite clearly a work of heart from debut author Andie Newton, and one which truly resonates. The girl lef tbehind not only refers to the maturation of Ella, but also of Claudia, the whole reason that Ella became involved in the Resistance in the first place.

I really enjoyed reading this and watching Ella with a lump in my throat as she became more deeply entangled in the Reich and living on a knife edge of perpetual fear of being found out-but even though she knew that the penalty for this would be death, and that she was overthrowing everything she had been taught, she had the courage of her convictions and her love for Claudia to propel her to fight for good. Evil could never triumph when there were people in the world brave enough to behave as she did. Very much looking forward to ‘The Girl From Vichy’ in 2020!

About the author…

Andie Newton is an American writer living in Washington State with her husband and two boys. She writes female-driven historical fiction set in WWII. Andie has a Bachelor in History and a Master in Teaching. ‘The Girl I Left Behind’ is her debut and was released by Aria Fiction in October 2019. ‘The Girl From Vichy’ will be released in July 2020 followed by another work of similar genre in 2021.

Twitter @Aria_Fiction @AndieNewton

Links-http://www.andienewton.com/