Girl in a Smart Uniform by Gill James

 

 

Gisela adores her brother Bear, her gorgeous BDM uniform and her little half-brother Jens. She does her best to be a good German citizen and is keen to help restore Germany to its former glory. She becomes a competent and respected BDM leader.

But life begins to turn sour. Her oldest brother Kurt can be violent, she soon realises that she is different from other girls, she feels uncomfortable around her mother’s new lover and there is something not quite right about Jens.  It becomes more and more difficult to be the perfect German young woman.          

Girl in a Smart Uniform is the third book in the Schellberg Cycle, a collection of novels inspired by a bunch of photocopied letters that arrived at a small cottage in Wales in 1979.

The letters give us some insights into what life was like growing up in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

This novel explores what may have motivated young women growing up in Nazi Germany and offers an explanation as to how a school for disabled children was allowed to carry on functioning throughout World War II.    

RRP 

£10.00  paperback

£2.39 Kindle  

Buy from Amazon  

Note, this is an affiliate link and a small portion of what you pay, at no extra cost to you,  may go to Bridge House Publishing.  

 

Buy from us (1 - 4 books)

 

Buy from us  (5+ books) 

 

 

Buy from Waterstones (UK)  

Buy from Barnes and Noble (US)  

Buy from Booktopia (Australia) 

I very much enjoyed this novel. It is fairly straight forward to find stories about war written from a male perspective, not so easy to find one that not only has a young woman as the main protagonist but Gisela is also a committed member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) the female equivalent of Hitler Youth in World War 2. She is so proud of her uniform and her opportunity to serve Germany and right the wrongs she perceives as having been foisted on her country. The reader follows her journey through adolescence and into womanhood, as she comes to terms with love, loss, identity and the discovery of the fickle nature of trust and truth.

            The short diary style chapters allow the reader to become engrossed in a narrative that switches between time, place and narrator. This technique works well; I could put the book down, pick it up a few days later and carry on with the story. As with all good stories, the reader is left with a few questions about some of the characters. This book is part three of a series of four book, The Schellberg Cycle, and I now want to read the others. That said this is a complete and satisfying read. It ends on a note of hope and possibility as Europe struggles into peace in the late 1940s.

            This is a terrific book that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Book club guide 

 

 

All three Schellberg Cycle books - £21.00

 

Find out more

Find out more

Find out more 

Buy from us 

   

 

I was unsure of how I would react to this book, as the holocaust is a very real story in our family. However, the social history starting before World War 1 and continuing to the present day, was extremely interesting and Clara herself had the attitude that where there’s hope there’s life. A well-written and thought-provoking book.  

 

This was a fascinating and thought-provoking read. Holocaust books that I've read in the past have been through the eyes of adults. In this book we experience it mainly through the round robin letters of a group of school girls who slowly become aware of some of what's going on but also, increasingly conscious of the police state they're in, trying to put a positive spin on their lives. The two main characters are a "Jewish" girl who didn't even know she was Jewish who is sent to England and a German girl who risks her life to help the special needs children in a secret school. There were a lot of characters and if I read it again, I'd keep a crib sheet so I could keep track but certainly worth a read. 

 

Girl in a Smart Uniform is the most fictional of the stories in the Schellberg Cycle to date, though some characters, familiar to those who have read the first two books, appear again here. Clara Lehrs, Karl Schubert and Dr Kühn really existed. We have a few, a very few, verifiable facts about them. The rest we have had to find out by repeating some of their experiences and by using the careful writer's imagination.