City of Thieves

This is one of those books that is both human and inhumane. It somehow manages to show all these war atrocities within the eyes of a 17 year old boy who can’t help but have those teenager boyish thoughts even his life is in jeopardy throughout the story.

Taking place in a besieged Russian town during WWII, main character Lev stumbles onto a dead body and loots it with a group of others. They are playing life on super hard mode where any kind of special food or gear is hard to come by, so they can’t help but look. Soldiers from his side see this and Lev ends up being the only one captured. Anything seen as a crime is pretty much a death sentence, so Lev is resigned to his fate. Surprisingly instead, he and one other are put on a quest to find a dozen eggs so the Colonel can have a cake baked for his daughter’s wedding. Not an easy task when food is scarce to begin with.

What follows is Lev and his partner Koyla going all throughout town trying different methods to obtain these eggs. They encounter cannibals who eat others to survive, an elder who died protecting his chickens while his son is left unable to process what’s happening, captured Russians going through a literacy test unknowingly signing their death warrants if they can read, and a young girl being taken advantage of by soldiers having her legs sawed off for attempting to run away while the other girls had to watch.

These are all absolute atrocities of war and it’s hard to imagine witnessing all these monstrous acts. Despite that, the book still manages to show the humanity of these two boys and their ways of coping together. They still talk and worry about things as simple as kissing a girl. The pacing allows enough time to breath in between moments and the tension when they’re captured at the end kept me on my toes with no idea how they’d succeed.

In the end, Koyla dies by his own soldiers mistaking him as an enemy and when Lev delivers the eggs it wasn’t even the big deal he thought as there were already eggs on hand. It really brought home how unjust the whole situation was for these boys and how little thought was put into the human lives of these everyday people during the war. Hey, at least he got the girl in the end.

Rating: 835/1000