A High and Hidden Place
by
Michele Claire Lucas
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Quote:
"I had a family, a big family, I had a town. I had a best friend. I had a house with a garden. I had a grandfather who was a printer. I had a grandfather who was a bookbinder. Isn't that a wonderful thing to be?"~ Christine pg.202
Started: August 26, 2018
Finished: September 6, 2018
hardback 288 pages
From the cover:
(prologue)
I was brought, at the age of six, to a convent, a cloistered place of asylum from the world that was roiling and thundering and awash in blood. I did not know then, of course, that the whole world was teeming with the motherless, the fatherless, the homeless, the dispossessed. I did not know then that I was an orphan among orphans, one of so many everywhere in the world, made so by events beyond my sight, beyond my awareness, in any case beyond my six-year-old ability to comprehend...I soon enough forgot my mother and the rest of my family. They had disappeared from my sight in a day, and then gradually, with the months and then the years, from my mind and my heart. The angel mothers became my parents, the other orphan girls, who were indeed no angel children after all, became my siblings. It may be difficult to believe, but my childhood, both before and after the terrible day of the fire, was a very happy one. But though I did not know it, I would forevermore be Christine of Oradour, with all that that appellation implied.
My Review:
I absolutely loved this book! I really felt it. It was by far one of the best written, although fiction books that I really believed.
"Fiction by fact" is one of my favorite types of books.
Michele Claire Lucas has done an amazing job of creating the character of one girl who lived through actual events.
While Christine of Oradour is fictional, Oradour-sur-Glane, France is an actual place, where a very heartless massacre occurred.
On June 10, 1944 by order of Waffen SS officer Adolf Otto Diekmann, all residents, mostly farmers, shopkeepers, housewives, children, and elderly were summoned to the town square, where they were then separated men from women and children.
The men were corralled into barns while the women and children were sent into the church.
The men were mostly shot in the knees or legs first to keep them from running, and for torture and later the barns were caught on fire. The women were burned alive inside the church.
Read on here for more on the actual events: Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
The photo was taken some years after the massacre occurred. My understanding is the town was left as is, as a memorial to those lives lost. The village is abandoned.
In the book, Christine Lenoir is a journalist during the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, and is watching the television when Lee Harvey Oswald is shot. The scene and sound on the television trigger memories Christine has long forgotten. While, she has no idea what they mean, she knows that they are very real. She has seen a man killed before. But how? And when?
Her parents died of influenza when she was only six years old and she then lived a quiet, un-tormented childhood inside the convent, raised by peaceful nuns.
Christine goes back to the convent, the safest place she knows. She doesn't understand the images she sees over and over, but she must find out what they mean.
The Sisters must know something. Is Christine ready for the answers?
Get the book here!
Don't miss out on this wonderful story!
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