Songbird: A Novel By Walter Zacharius

I had a tough time finding a book in the Z section. It seemed like all the titles were murder mysteries or had “death” or “blood” in the titles. What I found didn’t have too different a theme from all that: the Holocaust.

Songbird is the fictional story of a young Jewish girl caught in Poland as the Nazis invaded. Her family is put on a train towards Auschwitz but she escapes thanks to her father’s quick thinking and firm shove out the door.

The story is not the same as many of the death camp survivors stories you may have heard. The heroine, Mia, is not simply content to hide away and hope that things work out in the end; she takes matters into her own hands. Mia joins a teenage resistance army and starts down a long dangerous road toward information about her abducted family.

According to the book jacket, Zacharius is a World War II vetran, which accounts for the, assumedly, accurate descriptions of army life and everyday life in Europe during the war. I learned this fact after finishing the book and had thought while reading that the setting felt incredibly realistic.

This was a very quick read and the characters were very likeable. I wonder how true to life the plot is, however. None-the-less the story was exciting and the Zacharius drove the plot straight through to the end.