The girl you left behind

The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes                 Audio Book:  13 hours, 30 mins.        Hardback Book: 639 pages                        

The story begins in a little village in France during the German Occupation of WWI.    German troops have moved in to the surrounding countryside during the occupation of France during WWI and are keeping the French population under their control.    The Kommandant brings some of his troops into town and forces the local hotel owners to accommodate them and he orders the woman in charge, Sophie, to prepare meals for them in the hotel’s restaurant.    The French people are starving subsisting on meager bits of food the can scrounge together because the invading German army has taken all of their food, their livestock and pretty much anything else they see and want.    The people walk around weak and in a daze from hunger.     When Sophie tells the Kommandant there is nothing to cook for them the Kommandant says he will have supplies brought in for her to cook for them.   Refusal means death.   Cooking for them means suspicion of aiding the enemy from all the townsfolk.    Fearing annihilation of her sister and her children as  well as Sophie herself, she decides to comply without a fight.    The first night she and her sister are dizzy from all the wonderful smells of succulent meat and vegetables wafting through the kitchen.     After preparation and serving, Sophie and her sister have to sit down because they are weak to near passing out from their immense hunger.    The Kommandant comes to thank them and seeing them about to faint drooped over the chairs in the kitchen, he asks if they are sick?   Sophie tells him how weak with hunger they are and that the fumes of the food are making them limp with desire to eat.    He tells her to eat as if he expected they would.    Sophie thanks him and asks if the children can also eat.   He thinks it over but agrees that yes, the children must eat as well.   Sophie sees what she believes to be genuine kindness in the man.   For the time the Germans are there Sophie and her family are no longer without food.   They also share what they can with the townspeople but are treated with distrust as if they are collaborating with the enemy.   From that point on most of the townspeople, even though they are starving, too, will not accept anything from Sophie calling her a traitor and a prostitute and worse.    The baker will not offer her good bread but only a loaf he has added a disgusting ingredient to – think of the pie in the film, “The Help.”   Yeah, that ingredient.    The Kommandant  is particularly drawn to a painting Sophie’s artist husband painted of her.    He often stops to look longingly at it and discuss art and the school her husband studied at, etc.   Sophie’s husband and her sister’s husband both joined the war effort and word has got back to Sophie that her husband has been captured and taken to Dachau.   It comes to Sophie that perhaps due to their friendship, the Kommandant might help her to bring her husband back to her.     She begs, pleads, cries, then she offers him the paiting of her.    The Kommandant tells her if they weren’t friends the things she is asking of him could warrant a death sentence for her.   Seeing that he has said they are friends, she knows this may be her only chance to free the man she loves.   Finally she offers herself.   The Kommandant tells her it has been 3 years since he last saw his wife.   Finally it is agreed upon – she will come to him.    Lots of things happen in this exciting tail of war, loss and upheaval.   Jojo Moyes tells the story as if she is right there describing everything so perfectly you feel the hunger, you feel the terror, her verbal repertoire is so vast she can even make you smell the things both good and bad – the aromas from the kitchen or the smell of blood when someone or something is killed.   She truly conveys the war is hell feel and brings the reader right into the midst of the action happening on every page.  The story continues into present day with a huge tie-in bringing it all together with protagonists and antagonists at every turn.    A gripping story, haunting in its way.   You will continue to think about this one and dwell on the characters after you finish it.    I hope this book is made into a film someday it is a fabulous story and would be great on screen as well as the written page.   Applause for Jojo Moyes.   Another excellent story.