How Dare the Birds Sing

A Novel of Love and Fate

Fiction - Historical - Event/Era
365 Pages
Reviewed on 03/31/2019
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Author Biography

Marina Osipova was born in East Germany into a military family and grew up in Russia where she graduated from the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives. She also has a diploma as a German language translator from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages. In Russia, she worked first in a scientific-technical institute as a translator then in a Government Ministry in the office of international relations, later for some Austrian firms. For seventeen years, she lived in the United States where she worked in a law firm. Eventually, she found her home in Austria. She is an award-winning author and a member of the Historical Novel Society.

(From the author) Dominated by combat scenes, many books and movies about WWII fail to show what life was like for ordinary people in Stalinist Russia and particularly during that horrible war. With my books, I wanted to show a few slices of this life, especially for readers not closely acquainted with Russian history. My novels, The Cruel Romance and How Dare the Birds Sing, is my way of adding rarely covered details that illuminate an intimate part of the Russian war and post-war history seldom seen in the fiction available for western readers: the women’s war.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Amy Raines for Readers' Favorite

How Dare The Birds Sing: A Novel of Love and Fate by Marina Osipova is the story of a young Russian girl named Lyuba who finds herself in love with Gunter, a young German pilot. Gunter proposes to Lyuba but is taken away to Germany before the young man can even ask her mother’s permission to marry her. As the war between Russia and Germany ramps up, Lyuba finds herself proving her loyalty to her country over and over. Even after losing the most precious people in her life, she still tries desperately to help fight the war exploding around her as well as the battle taking place in her heart. Will the loss of those dearest to her build a frozen wall around her heart? Will she ever meet Gunter again? Will Lyuba ever find peace and happiness in the face of so much pain, conflict and turmoil in a time of desperation and war?

How Dare The Birds Sing by Marina Osipova is a bold story with a twisting and turning plot as she highlights the blooming and loss of love during the Holocaust. The characters are interesting and easy to relate to as the reader is taken to unexpected places along Lyuba’s journey through Russian and German territory. I love the way Osipova describes events so that the reader has to turn the page just to see where Lyuba will wind up going next and why. I recommend How Dare The Birds Sing to anyone who loves a romance full of adventure in a time when some romances are frowned upon or completely forbidden. I loved this book.