Review: The Polish Daughter by Gosia Nealon*

  *I received a copy of this book in eBook format via NetGalley in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity.

Title: The Polish Daughter
Author: Gosia Nealon
Genre: Historical Fiction

Trigger warnings:  Rape, Torture, War, Antisemitism, Guns, Domestic Abuse, Physical Abuse By A Parent

Rating: ★★★★★

Poland, 1944: Armed men line the streets herding us forward, ignoring screams as they pull people from the crowd. My heart pounds as I hear a familiar cry. They have hold of my darling friend. I desperately push through to her, to save her. But we are too densely packed in. I can’t hold back my sobs as she crumples. I am too late…

When war broke out, Julia’s father, a high-ranking Polish Officer, took her from Warsaw to keep her safe. Now, with her father missing-in-action, Julia has returned to find him and fight for the resistance—but the city is more dangerous than she ever thought it could be.

When she is trapped in the ghetto, Nazis dragging people into the streets all around her, Julia can only watch in horror as her dearest friend is pulled from the crowd. Heart shattering as her friend falls to the cobbled streets, Julia’s desperate screams attract the soldiers’ attention, and it seems she is about to suffer the same awful fate.

Until her childhood sweetheart, Nikolaj, appears in enemy uniform and stops the guards with one word. The boy Julia remembers would never side with the Germans: and in the safety of his private room, he explains he is a resistance spy within the ranks of Nazi officers. But the longer he keeps her in the barracks, surrounded by his soldiers, the more Julia grows uneasy about the man she once knew…

Half-Jewish and with her father a wanted man, how safe can she be behind enemy lines? Has her childhood friend become one of the monsters she has been fighting against? And if he has, will she ever be able to escape him?

The Polish Daughter is the third book in Gosia Nealon’s Secret Resistance series. After reading and reviewing the first two instalments of the series earlier this year, I was eagerly awaiting the publication of The Polish Daughter and it certainly did not disappoint.

Each of the Secret Resistance stories exist within the same universe and are all centered around the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. This gives us a unique opportunity to explore the events of the uprising from the perspectives of a range of characters who each had different roles to play in the resistance effort. There is a natural overlap of characters and events across the three stories and I personally really enjoyed the opportunities to encounter the protagonists from previous novels and see how all of their stories fit together like puzzle pieces. It is important to note that the books will work as standalone stories if you don’t fancy committing to an entire series but I would strongly recommend reading the entire trilogy back-to-back.

The Polish Daughter is an intense and gripping story which is fast-paced and packed full of action and suspense. Gosia Nealon’s captivating writing style has created another of the powerfully hard-hitting stories we’ve seen in the rest of the series and as with her other works the story doesn’t shy away from sharing the brutal atrocities of the Nazi regime. This book also rounds up the series by further exploring the cruelty of the Soviet regime in Poland following the end of the war.

Julia was a fiercely courageous and tenacious protagonist who, alike all of the other characters in the Secret Resistance series, had such depth to her character. The exploration of grief we get through Julia’s character and the losses she experiences was particularly powerful and a highlight of the story for me. Her infatuation with Nikolaj made her naïve and oblivious to his true nature and I thought both this and the gradual process of Julia opening her eyes to the reality of his character were really well written. In Nikolaj, Gosia Nealon has created a truly vile antagonist who perfectly captures the brutality and evil of the Nazis.

Throughout the story we get little nods to the Polish language and Polish culture and this really helped the story to feel authentic.

One criticism I would have is that I simply would have liked the story to have been longer. The main narrative is set five years on from the prologue and this has meant that we have missed a really significant portion of Julia’s story and with it a significant portion of her character development. We’re told about her earning the nickname of the ‘huntress of the north’ but it would have been nice to have the story behind this explored in a little more depth.

Overall, The Polish Daughter is a really powerful piece of historical fiction which has brought Gosia Nealon’s Secret Resistance series to a hell of a close.

Click here to read my review of the first book in Gosia Nealon’s Secret Resistance Series: The Polish Girl.

Click here to read my review of the second book in Gosia Nealon’s Secret Resistance Series: The Polish Wife.