CITY OF THIEVES by David Benioff ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’ve been wanting to interview my grandparents for a while now. Mostly to get their life stories recorded, knowing they will almost surely be more impressive than mine could ever be, but also to know them better. It’s sometimes hard to view family members as people with their own back stories and journeys. It’s a mind-trip to picture them young with fears and dreams that haven’t been conquered yet. I want to know what growing up in their time was like and what made them into the seemingly content adults they’ve become.

David Benioff accomplished this at the ultimate level, turning his grandfather’s incredible true story into one for the masses. While this shared the “what’s true and what’s fabricated” theme that The Things They Carried had, it also shared the brilliance that made it easy not to care; tightly written, hard to put down, 250 pages packing enough story for 500 and breezing by like fifty. It made me wonder, was this more praised when it came out? I had heard basically nothing about it before randomly buying it knowing Benioff went on to be the executive producer of Game of Thrones. But it’s one of the smoothest/most entertaining reads I’ve had in the last few years and stands out for its completeness. I hope it had its moment in the sun when it was published, and if not, I hope it does now. It’s phenomenal.

What do we want when we’re young? We want to have the answers we know only come from being on this earth longer. We want to believe there’s more to existence than strife, that there’s a purpose to all this. We want to feel like we are enough. We want to feel a lot of things. And in the case of those that experienced this historic and hellish war, we want to live. I can’t imagine how much harder it was growing up during World War II. I’m sure a lot of childhoods burned up fast. This was a cohesive account of living in Leningrad at the time and a good reminder not to take what we have today for granted.

Hunger, violence, longing, and humor: a coming-of-age concoction that isn’t pretty to read at points but is an unexpectedly perfect blend. It’s good the whole way through, something I discovered long ago is a rarity. I read it in about 10 days, the last half in one. As I’ve learned from reading 100-word whip-crackers to 1000 page barnburners, you don’t have to be long-winded to find real depth and leave a mark. This book is a shining example.