Chasing Shadows - a book review

 

Chasing Shadows by Lynn Austin is a story about three women and how God works in each of their lives to strengthen their faith.  

The first woman is Lena, a Dutch woman who farms alongside her husband.  Her father was the pastor of the local church in the village close to her farm.

The second woman is Ans, Lena's daughter, who was tired of living on the farm and desired to move to the city.  She does move to Leiden and acquires a job caring for the wife of a professor at the university in Leiden.  The wife's name is Eloise, who has had much trauma in her life when losing one family member after another because of the war.  Ans also meets a young man who is a police officer and they fall in love.

The third woman is Miriam, a young Jewish violinst who fled with her father to the Netherlands to escape persecution, as the Netherlands were neutral and kind to the Jewish people who immigrated there.

The story unfolds when the Nazis invade the Netherlands and eventually get to the town of Leiden. There are parts of the story that give a bit of insight into what the concentration camps were like.  Ans worked with the Dutch Resistance, always putting the needs of the Jewish people ahead of her own, as a result of the way God worked in her heart through everything that she went through.

I hesitate to say much more because I don't want to give away too much.  It's such a great read...sometimes not able to turn the pages fast enough to find out what was taking place next.  

One thing that I do want to emphasize is that even though this book is set during the time of the Second World War, the invasion of the Nazis in the Netherlands and the ill treatment of the Jews, the thing that I appreciated was that the focus was each of these women and how at one point their lives all began to intertwine and their relationships grew.  They each had a part to play in the war and the lives of their loved ones.  And especially how each of them grew deeper in  their relationship with God.