If I Should Die Before I Wake

Easily one of my favorite books ever, Han Nolan always writes a book that makes me go through in one sitting. Her first book, “If I should Die Before I Wake” centers around Hilary, a Nazi German girl who truly hates all Jews. When she got into a motorcycle accident with her boyfriend, she is in critical condition in the hospital, but suddenly lives her life as a Jewish girl named Chana, who is trying to make a living in the desolate areas of the ghettos. During her unconsciousness, Hilary is taken into a new world where she sees the lives of the people she always looked down to, ate, breathed and lived like them and cried the same tears as them when fear struck their hearts.

Holocaust novels always seem to interest me, but this one was one of the most interesting because it made people literally “walk in the shoes of another person”. We lived in this vivid “dream” that Hilary escaped to and learned more than than she could ever do if she never got into that accident.

I can understand why Nolan receives multiple awards for her novels because she takes it to the heart and gives away something that an audience yearns for when taken into a novel, and that is the idea to show and not tell. Her description is vivid and it makes it worth turning the pages to.