Another view: Through readers’ eyes
Publishing a book is a gateway to the unexpected in countless ways, as well as a nonstop curve of learning and discovery.
One of the most delightful parts of the experience is the way it reconnects you with people you know, and opens the door to a whole world of making new friends.
Reader Mary Spires and I met years ago at a writer’s conference but I haven’t seen her since she traveled half a world away and back. In her review at Goodreads, she called The Munich Girl “a story of love, power and the meaning of family” and wrote: “Readers see 1930s and ’40s Germany through the eyes of young women growing into adulthood. In the midst of increasing chaos, they fall in love, develop allegiances and make sacrifices. While family secrets unfold to the next generation, we see how their support for one another has allowed each to play out her role in a period of transition. These themes cross barriers of time, nationality and political persuasion.” 
Reader Linda Marie Marsh approached me very politely after I’d held a giveaway for the book and she hadn’t managed to be one of the winners. I’m so grateful that she proved the maxim: “If you don’t ask, the answer’s always no,” and, in her courteous courage, opened the door to a friendship that the book and I are so grateful to have.
“I KNOW it’s quite early in the year,” she wrote at Goodreads on February 1, “but I will say this anyway. The Munich Girl will be one of the best books I read this year … The author has taken and blended a mix of stories and created a whopper of historical fiction — well-kept secrets, unknown family ties, true friendship, and an ease of flowing back and forth in time — from the 1930s and ’40s to the present day. I have always wondered why Eva Braun Hitler was assumed to be a blonde ditz and historically shoved aside. Phyllis Ring uses words to make a page-flattened person become whole, become real, and gives us a 3-dimensional woman who had brains, beauty and just happened to fall for the charms of a sociopath. Yes, I loved that aspect, but there was so much more to the ‘what if’ novel. I devoured it.”
Reader Cynthia Minor is another book friend of the heart with whom I’ve been connected through the virtual world, and through a wonderful writer named Donna Baptiste. In her thoughts about the book, Cynthia wrote at Goodreads: “It is difficult to know where the ‘real’ ends and the ‘possible’ begins. Reading The Munich Girl was like taking a journey to another place and another time. … The story weaves itself across continents and decades, and is a beautiful image of the way our lives are not only connected to those we know and share life with, but with those in our past, whom we may or may not even be aware of. 
“As the author states: ‘One could look at another’s life and judge or envy what it seemed to show. But things were almost always more complex than they appeared.’ This was and is still true, of everyone we meet.”
What a privilege it is for this writer, that the pathway of a book and its story leads to meeting so many thoughtful souls.
Find the Goodreads page for The Munich Girl here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27914910-the-munich-girl#other_reviews
