Corina Bomann / Historical novel

A great moment

Staying strong in a bad situation

Disclaimer: This is a book from a German author and I couldn’t find an English translation yet, so I translated this title from the original German title.

In this book, we follow Hanna Richter, a young nurse who saw her fiancé die in front of her eyes in the First World War. This experience left a trauma behind that she struggles with for a long time. She gets the chance to build a new hospital with doctor Conradi and that’s just what she needs.

What is great about this book?

The structure

This book reads like a diary, Which is not surprising since the epilogue tells that this book is based on a diary of a real nurse that has worked in Waldfriede. 

History from a German perspective

It is beautiful to follow how determined you had to be to start something new in post-war Germany. It’s like every time they fix one problem another appears. But they get through it and succeed.

Of course, I heard of the heavy inflation in Germany after the war, because of the rebuilding costs they had to pay the damaged countries. I also knew that riots broke out because of it. Those were not written out in our history books, but they are only a small part of the big theme which is World War I.

This book gave me a more realistic image of how it must have been to live through this period in Germany. Even though they were still a bit protected in Waldfriede.

Link with current events

Although the current inflation is not as extreme as then it is still very noticeable. People who are trying to buy a house at the moment recognize so many situations from this book.

What could have been better? 

Well, it is a book of 571 pages. In a book that has this amount of pages, you do want enough events or activities to keep reading. Here there were a lot of situations that eventually didn’t add to the total story and that are filler pages. If a book only counts 400 pages it is also a complete book. It is not necessary to fill pages with situations that do not add anything to the story. Especially if you know that two more books are coming for this series.

The Dutch title ‘Gloriedagen’ is a nod to the best days of something. I sure hope these were not their best days. I suspect that de best days will be for the second book. The original German title is ‘Sternstunde’ which translates to ‘Great moment’. That is more in line with the content of the book.

It is a beautiful story, but these two remarks have lowered my score.

Love BookDragon.

I wrote this review for Libelle magazine and that’s also why the structure of this review is a bit different. If you want to see what they made of it you can view it over here: Libelle Leesclub: ons recensieteam las ‘Gloriedagen’ van Corina Bomann – Libelle