Kristin Harmel – The Forest Of Vanishing Stars
Posted 26th August 2022
Category: Reviews Genres: 2020s, Historical, Spiritual
Comments Off on Kristin Harmel – The Forest Of Vanishing Stars
Publisher: Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster)
Pages: 356
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-982-15893-4
First Published: 6th July 2021
Date Reviewed: 10th August 2022
Yona was raised by Jerusza in forests in central and eastern Europe; at twenty, Yona knows how to survive. With war beginning, she comes across a girl in the woods who has been injured; the girl is Jewish and, once better, she leads Yona to her parents, the three of them escapees from a ghetto established by the Nazis. Yona has always been alone and not lived in a society, but this is the start of years spent helping others to survive against the odds.
The Forest Of Vanishing Stars is a wonderfully told story of bravery amongst awful circumstances. Told with care, Harmel presents a story grounded in true history, showing a situation not often covered.
The history is that of over a thousand Jews who survived the war by hiding and learning to live in a forest, people who escaped death and banded together. Harmel takes the concept as her basis and includes the group as reference, creating a different, smaller group effectively led by her fictional resident of the forest, Yona.
It is Yona who makes the fiction. Taken from her German parents by an old woman with a sixth sense who sees a bad future for the then toddler if she’s left there, Yona grows up with an effective mystic who teaches her everything about survival but doesn’t stop her from learning about the outside world, just from living in it. Yona can speak many languages, can read, and knows about religion and history. She also knows how to kill.
This all means that the majority of the book takes place in the forest and Harmel does well in keeping you reading, knowing when to change things up. The fiction she weaves around the history is compelling and, when appropriate, satisfying. And Harmel tells you everything no matter how horrible – this book has one of the worst scenes of death in WW2 books I’ve read so far.
Harmel’s success, then, lies not only in the telling of her story but in the specific choices she makes. There are moments that seem very fictional but you never need to suspend your belief for them to work, however little the odds were of them happening. And the author’s care in itself, as an element on its own even, is also a big reason for the success.
Whilst the plot is inevitably highly important, character development is more so. You see the individuals, always, and you see the very human thoughts and impulses that go on even in survival mode. And again, Harmel’s dedication to her relatively small group of primary characters helps make this novel as good as it is. Whilst things do come to a head at points, and there is some spillover into the wider world, that is still small, and the vast majority of the book concerns the group living away from the war itself, in it but also outside it.
The ending is potentially a surprise depending on your own reading of the book. Either way, it provides a very suitable conclusion to the entirety. There are ‘big’ heroes and ‘small’ heroes and all help the whole.
The Forest Of Vanishing Stars is excellent. It pulls at your emotions, it involves fascinating history, it delivers satisfaction, and it’s written beautifully.
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