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The Ways We Hide by Kristina McMorris
Pub Date 06 Sep 2022 SOURCEBOOKS Landmark
The Ways We Hide features the protagonist Ida Vos, a woman we first meet as a magician, having designed and created illusions for the stage in the early 1940s. This alone is interesting but as we get to know her we learn that she carries with her a sense of loneliness and independence due to bringing raised in an orphanage after her alcoholic father dies. Prior to his death she experienced a trauma that only the young boy, Arie, who suffered it with her understands. She ends up living with his family. As she grows up Arie is her stability and the two of them practice magic tricks together.
Without giving away too much, I’ll tell you that they are separated and then during the war their paths cross again in London. He is in intelligence, and she’s been recruited to help develop tools that can be hidden to help Allied Forces, maps, knives, and all sorts of things a soldier behind enemy lines might need.
Ida ends up pushing herself into a mission that she thinks will help save Arie in Nazi occupied Holland. Nothing ends up as she imagined. Ida is confronted with the horrors of war and she and Arie must save a young girl who lives with a Nazi officer but who has Jewish roots that may soon be discovered. How Ida manages to overcome the trauma from her childhood that still haunts her, danger from being discovered by the Nazis, her natural distrust of strangers that she now must depend upon (the Dutch resistance during WWII was incredible and deserves attention), grief that continues to find her, together make for a thrilling tale that once I got halfway through the book kept me intrigued as though I watched it unfold on a screen.
The author does a superb job with descriptions and characterizations. Her notes at the end are not to be missed as so much is explained and examined. An incredible amount of research was put into this novel and it shines because of that effort. I thoroughly enjoyed this one and recommend it to all who enjoy historical fiction.
I received an advance complimentary copy of the novel from the publisher through NetGalley without obligation of any review.
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