Review of RESILIENCE

RESILIENCE is a wonderful tale of the resilience of the human spirit to start again and change directions when things don’t go as hoped for or as planned. Author Jan Jongstra does an excellent job of developing the characters of Karl and his mother, the two main characters in the book. I appreciated Karl’s commitment to his mother and his desire to make his parents proud of him, whatever trials and tribulations they might face. Both characters got under my skin and I found myself talking to them and decrying what I saw as their sometimes nonsensical decisions. It takes a clever writer to evoke passion in a reader and the author deserves kudos for achieving that. The help the main characters received from total strangers along the way was perhaps overly serendipitous. Still, it was also an excellent example of the truism that generally people are good and kind and want to help others when they possibly can. It was telling that, from Karl’s perspective, his brother’s last words to him before Karl and his mother left Poland were most hurtful and, in many ways, dictated how he eventually contributed to the overall war effort. The interlude in Paris with the American jazz musicians was fascinating and the idea that Karl may have invented an entirely new jazz subset and received no credit for having done so was ironic, given the successes he did have in overcoming the odds in his path.

RESILIENCE is a satisfying and enjoyable read with a running undertone of musicality that I can highly recommend to readers.

5 star review                                         Reader's Favorite