Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Storm Publishing, and Lelita Babcock for the advanced reader copy of the book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.
I’ve been reading a lot of historical fiction as of late, so I thought I was immune from the tugging-at-the-heartstrings emotion that some of them evoke. Reading The Girl Who Crossed Mountains proved that to be wrong. For the last few chapters of the book, I was bawling my eyes out.
Beginning in 1936, the story is set in San Sebastian, Spain. The Spanish Civil War is playing out around the residents of the town. Abene is a fisherman’s daughter who lives in the poorer outskirts of the town with her family and close friends. Miren is the daughter of a wealthy hotelier. They meet at one point and then are apart for the majority of the story. When the Civil War comes to town, Abene flees with her mother and a close friend over the mountains to the Basque region of France. Miren helps people escape the Nationalists through her job in the local government. Her boss and lover, Anders, flits in and out of her life, making a lot of promises he never follows through on.
With Hitler making noise in Germany, France was not a safe haven either, but the refugees did not know what was coming. Abene makes close friends in France. As the funding dries up for the refugee centers and the refugees themselves, she takes sanctuary with one of them, Camille, at the small farm Camille’s father owns. Feeling she must do something to help out in the war, Abene is soon part of a network that helps get Allied soldiers and others across the Pyrenees Mountains to freedom.
I’ve read other books where this network helped soldiers behind enemy lines, but I never realized there was still so much danger once they were out of Nazi-controlled territory. There are many details here about life under Franco’s rule in Spain that I hadn’t realized before. Franco was playing both sides in the war, and, if discovered, the Spanish authorities often turned these Allied soldiers and others over to the Nazis.
This story didn’t grab me initially, but once I was a way into the book, I couldn’t put it down. The characters are well-written and rich with detail. I felt like I was reading a story about people I knew. One of the soldiers Abene saves has come back to Spain in the 1980s, and it flashes back and forth between that time and that of the War. Details are revealed a little at a time, so there is no knowing what the ending will be. When I arrived at that part of the story, the tears were falling. I could root for what I wanted to happen, and what the earlier part of the book seemed to indicate, but the author had other ideas. It’s handled very well and makes the story all the more gripping.
Overall, the tone of the book is about home, though, and how we define it. I can get behind the author’s message that home is not a place but a people. It is also not necessarily defined by blood. It’s a good message to people in this day and age where we seem so closed up with people as we sit in our homes and stare at screens, thinking that social media represents the real world. The Girl Who Crossed Mountains harkens back to a time when people helped each other out, rather than shut down and decided it was none of their business. Sure, that still happened, but there seemed to be much more light to contrast the darkness in the world.
I loved The Girl Who Crossed Mountains and recommend it to anyone who likes historical fiction or just a good tear-jerker. It will tug at your emotions but in a good way.
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Categories: Book Reviews
“Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. Doctors expect him to be in this condition for some time.” – Recurring line, “Weekend Update” skits (1975-1976), SNL
Franco was a master at political maneuvering. Ideologically, he sympathized more with Hitler’s Greater German Reich and Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy. He owed much of his success in the civil war against the Republican government to German and Italian assistance (in both men and materiel), and he was a staunch anti-Communist. He wasn’t as ardent a pro-Nazi as his foreign minister (and co-brother-in-law) Ramón Serrano Suñer, but he sent a force of Spanish Army volunteers (the “Division Azul” (the “Blue Division”) to fight alongside the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.
And, as you point out, he was a canny operator during World War II. He knew that Spain was in no shape to join the Axis after a devastating three-year civil war. He was also an experienced military man and smart enough to understand that as powerful as Nazi Germany was, a Hitler victory was not a sure thing, especially if Great Britain did not capitulate and, even more so, if the United States entered the war on the Allied side. (Britain could have blockaded Spain with the Royal Navy and starved the Nationalist regime into submission, and the U.S. would have stopped shipments of oil to the wartorn Iberian peninsula. Germany had no surplus oil or food supplies to spare, so….)
Franco did, as the novel probably points out, hedge his bets and provide assistance to the Axis. He allowed U-boats to have access to Spanish ports, and he also provided some raw materials (including wolfram) to the German war effort. He also allowed German agents to operate within Spain’s borders. But he refused to give the German army and Luftwaffe (air force) transit rights in Spanish territory, not even for a joint operation to take Gibraltar from the British.
I don’t know if the novel mentions the famous Hitler-Franco meeting in the French border town of Hendaye, in October of 1940. This was at the zenith of Hitler’s power, when he still hadn’t invaded the USSR and Britain was the only Allied power challenging Germany’s dominion over Western Europe. “Der Fuhrer” tried to convince Franco to enter the war sooner rather than later…when he could get a word in edgewise. It is recorded that Franco irritated Hitler with an ingratiating smile, flattery, long-winded declarations of his support for the Axis cause mixed with a long list of reasons why Spain was in no shape to join the war NOW. Then he gave Hitler a long list of the materiel his armed forces would need when they were ready to go, as well as a wish list of French colonies in North Africa Franco wanted for his contribution to the German-Italian war effort.
Hitler, who wanted Vichy France as a partner in both the war against Churchill’s Britain and the upcoming invasion of the USSR, was piqued by Franco’s demands and rejected them, as Franco probably expected the Nazi leader to do. The Fuhrer wasn’t impressed by the Generalissimo’s wheeling and dealing, saying that he would rather have four teeth pulled out rather than talk to Franco again.
Good review, Patti.
It doesn’t get into the details, but it does make it clear that Spain collaborated with the Nazis. The town of San Sebastian is featured and many of the top Nazis came there for R&R. This is historical fiction, after all, and not a history book.
Thanks!
🙂
Yep. I wouldn’t expect that kind of detail regarding the “Big Picture” in this novel. The only novels that I’ve read that do delve into the strategies and politics of WWII at that level of historical detail are “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” by Herman Wouk