The Girl in Gray Author: Annette Lyon
Genres: Historical Romance
Format: eBook
Pages: 318
Date: October 29, 2019
Publisher: Blue Ginger Books
A country fighting to stay free.
A woman with an impossible decision.
In November of 1939, Sini Toivola is sure of two things: she loves Marko Linna, and she has a comfortable life in Helsinki. But when the massive Soviet army invades her beloved homeland and Marko spurns her affections, her life is turned upside down. Needing a fresh start, Sini decides to join the female volunteer corps—the Lotta Svärd—and is sent to serve near the front lines. Service at a field hospital proves a good distraction—until Sini discovers a Russian soldier lost behind their camp.
Duty requires her to turn him in, but her heart begs to keep him safe and help him escape. Torn between love for her country and love for her enemy, Sini must choose—but no matter what choice she makes, heart-wrenching consequences await them all.
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About Annette Lyon
Annette Lyon is a Whitney Award-winning author and a three-time recipient of Utah’s Best of State medal for fiction. She has received many publication awards from the League of Utah Writers, including the Silver Quill for PAIGE, one of her books in the co-written Newport Ladies Book Club series. She is the author of over a dozen novels, at least as many novellas, a cookbook, a grammar guide, plus some 120 hundred articles.
This book is well written and gives a good picture of the war but it wasn’t my cup of tea. I’d probably give 4 stars for writing but I just didn’t like it that much. I listened to the audio-book and was muddling along just fine until Sini harbors an enemy soldier in camp and almost immediately falls in love and has sex. And that was when I began to dislike listening to it. I kept thinking how Sini is so love starved and insecure that the first moment someone actually pays attention to her she gives him not just food, supplies and shelter but also her heart and body. I ended up not really liking Sini as a character. She seemed too pathetic. Marko is dense about Sini’s feelings for him and takes advantage of Sini’s desperate hope for his love as she constantly feeds him free meals etc… Leila is too angelic. Nikolai might have been my favorite of them except that he also takes advantage of Sini though his feelings are probably more real. I just didn’t really love any of them. And because of that the book felt long. A lot of the romance aspects of the story I predicted would happen but there was some stuff in the book that totally came out of the blue and my response was kind of an “ewww”. I didn’t like it. I think if you love war stories where romances don’t end up tied into a nice pretty bow you might like this story better than I did.
Part of what I didn’t like is that I expected this author to always write “clean” romance and in this book there was sex, language and violence. I wasn’t expecting it. The sex was fade to black I think. When the foreplay got descriptive I skipped ahead because I just didn’t care so there could have been more written about it than I thought.
The narrator did a good job with the characters and the Finnish names etc.
Sex: yes
Language: some, including Deity
Violence: it is a war story
*I received a complimentary copy of this audio-book from the author and voluntarily chose to review it.