I flew through this and can say for sure that the only aspect I did not like was the use of actual people in the book. Maybe that's because I don't usually read much historical fiction but it's strange to me to add the real Albert Einstein and Josephine Baker into a fictional book. I'd have rather seen a fictional character based on the two of them. This drastically took away from the book for me.
Besides this, and this isn't something easy to get past if you ask me, the book is really good. I loved the German words and phrases and it reminded me of when I was younger reading the words and phrases I heard so often. I liked that this was a different look into this time. As important as survivor testimonies and fictional accounts of the Holocaust from the survivor standpoint are, we hear less about what life was like for Germans, especially a family so against Hitler. The feelings of Gaby and her family really showed.
I really love how easy it is to understand the timeline of how Hitler and the Holocaust came about. Much of that can be very confusing and unless it's explained properly one can really get turned around. This could be tedious to go through for anyone who knows a decent amount about WW1 and the beginning of Hitler's rise but I think it's explained well here and it wasn't bad to rehash IMO.

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