Gracianna - The Friday 56 and Book Beginnings on Friday

I have barely started reading Gracianna by Trini Amador, but I think I'm going to enjoy this story. It takes place in Paris in the early 1940s as the Germans are occupying France. 

Book Beginning (Prologue):
     Odds are I was the only four-year-old to have ever freely fumbled a loaded German Luger.
     I was barely able to lift it. How could I know it was a real gun?

The Friday 56 (from 56% on my Kindle). I haven't reached this point in the story.
He could never tell Gracianna how badly she had been beaten.Just like that, Constance was going to be "s'en va [going away]," the term used for the many who were sent to the camps.

Genre: Family Saga / Historical Fiction 
   Length: 301 Pages
   Amazon Link: Gracianna

Synopsis from Goodreads:
     The gripping story of Gracianna--a French-Basque girl forced to make impossible decisions after being recruited into the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris.
     Gracianna is inspired by true events in the life of Trini Amador's great-grandmother, Gracianna Lasaga. As an adult, Amador was haunted by the vivid memory of finding a loaded German Luger tucked away in a nightstand while wandering his great-grandmother's home in Southern California. He was only four years old at the time, but the memory remained and he knew he had to explore the story behind the gun.
     Decades later, Amador would delve into the remarkable odyssey of his Gracianna's past, a road that led him to an incredible surprise. In Gracianna, Amador weaves fact and fiction to tell his great-grandmother's story.
     Gracianna bravely sets off to Paris in the early 1940s--on her way to America, she hopes--but is soon swept into the escalation of the war and the Nazi occupation of Paris. After chilling life-and-death struggles, she discovers that her missing sister has surfaced as a laborer in Auschwitz. When she finds an opportunity to fight back against the Nazis to try to free her sister, she takes it--even if it means using lethal force.
     As Amador tells the imagined story of how his great-grandmother risked it all, he delivers richly drawn characters and a heart-wrenching page-turner that readers won't soon forget. 

                 

Anyone can participate in Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56.
Click HERE to connect to other Book Beginnings posts (sponsored by Rose City Reads)