Haunting, horrific and devastating. this novel captures some of the horrors of Auschwitz. Ella and Rose become friends while being forced to work in Madame H's sewing shop. This book describes the day to day life in such a way that you feel like you are reading a memoir. This novel will definitely stick with me for a while.

Rose becomes Ella's friend and bunk mate in the Birchwood, Auschwitz camp where they work tirelessly away on garment after garment for their customers.



Marta is their boss and watches over their work and punishes or approves the girls work while taking credit for made garments most of the time especially when it comes to Carla their main recurring customer.



Ella talks of life with her grandma learning to see whilst Rose has a posh upbringing as her mum was an author and father a gentleman. She often feels Rose lives in a fantasy made up.



However the horrors of concentration camps we learn about in history play out in this book, ideas of liberation, hard labour, dangerous illness and has chambers, bartering for food as well.



We see strong bonds of friendship woven between our two main characters as they act like sisters taking care of each other both holding onto hope of escaping and finding their ways back home or to each other with the red ribbon they share binding their friendship.



We learn of the harsh truths of life and how strong they fight to survive I'm sure is how it was really for many girls, women and boys, men too. They hold into hope with their ribbon helping them fantasize about The brighter future they stand to possibly reach eventually.



The girls lives were harshly real and each page was stitched with words bringing their story to a very real seeming emotional and hard life.



Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!

When I first started reading this book, I had forgotten that it was about the Holocaust. It read, if you didn't know better, like a future dystopia, where children were grabbed off the street and forced to work at whatever they could, in a place away from the rest of the world.

Part of this is sort of on purpose, because to make us truly see how horrible this is, the author always refers to Birkenau as Birchwood, which is the translation of the word into English. She refers to Paris as the City of Light. She wants, I expect, to see if she can bring us fully into the story, into the horror that were the concentration camps, but removing the language that we are used to.

And it works. Although this is fiction, it is based on fact, that there really was a contingent of women sewing for the commandant, and his wife, and the officers, while the ovens and the gas chambers happened all around them.

Very good, sad story. But hope is always there. Very realistic.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

"The Red Ribbon" is a beautifully written novel about the atrocities of the Holocaust and the people who were forced to suffer in Auschwitz.

The novel doesn't shy away from the horrific things happening at concentration camps during WW2 and shows how the prisoners and even some of the guards were struggling to survive and to decide what choices to make.

I really liked that the characters were all so different from each other and how their choices were all understandable if not always entirely palatable. I was especially impressed by Adlington's attempts to humanize one of the guards without downplaying how awful her actions and the ideology she follows truly are.

The main focus of the novel, of course, is Ella and she is a wonderful protagonist to follow. Her determination to survive and her struggle to make the right choices and make the best of a situation that shouldn't exist in the first place make her a well-developed, sympathetic, and very human character.

Overall, this novel deals with a heavy subject matter in a beautiful and heart-breaking way.