Chocolate Muffins

For a while now I have been reading the book The Children of Freedom by Marc Levy and right from the begging this book was gripping and powerful. After briefly reading the blurb I knew this book was about the French Resistance and instantly categorized it as yet another story about war where the hero and the heroine fall in love and face their struggles together, but regardless I decided to read it.

"Tomorrow I shall love you; today I don't yet know you," is the first line of the prologue and I personally think it is the best line of the book and after reading it over and over and over again, I thought it would be best to move on. To begin with you feel like you have uncovered somebodies personal diary and are harbouring a huge secret even if you're not quite sure what it is. This book delves into the world of the resistance through the lives of two brothers, Jeannot and Claude, and their friends who you are slowly introduced to. When reading, a range of different of different emotions swirl around inside you, grief, fear, joy, the thirst for freedom, all at once. You are inevitably drawn to the two young boys who are barely past their teens, but show greater courage and determination than grown men who would rather betray their country and dignity to bow down to the German intruders. As I mentioned before you meet a lot of characters but to remember them all is not a challenge as I felt I would let them down if I had, however small their action was they risked their lives just to free France. What is especially moving is that hardly any of them were french but it didn't matter because that was how strongly they felt about the cause. Just when you began to feel an attachment to the youth of the brigade, they would be swept away, pratically taken away from you, by the Germans, the French, by death. However through all this sadness and despair, there was hope. Hope for a better world and a better life. Hope that you did all you could. Hope that you made a difference and hope that yours friends were safe. I don't want to give any of the book away because it is truly incredible and a must read.

p.s. The cover is deceiving!