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 I am a two star review in a sea of four and five star reviews. Usually that would make me second guess my opinion but then I saw a whole mass of DNFs and knew I was wasn't the only one who found parts of this unbearable. Unbearable in the bad way. 
 I went into this expecting a riveting, high-stakes, realistic historical re-imagining of World War II with the deep ties of friendship and loyalty at the center. Although it told a good story of friendship, the rest was akin to a history lesson spoken in the dull, monotonous voice of your high school social studies teacher. 
 Julie, a girl known by many other names, is occasionally an entertaining narrator but the information being told is so boring to me overall I couldn't bring myself to care. That is where this book really went downhill. Useless information of WWII, planes, Nazis, torture, and war maneuvers told to us in hopes to force us to create bonds with these characters just did the opposite and turned me off. Where I was supposed to develop emotions, I only developed annoyance. 
 There are pages and pages (probably 400 of those 447) dedicated to this war drivel and I just don't see why. Well, I understand why, but it could have been done in a way so it would be more entertaining. A great idea for a story, but poor execution. Frankly, I can't understand how people withstood these 400 pages to get to the emotional ending that resulted in them giving this five stars. 
 My co-blogger loved this book so much and that was pretty much the only reason I didn't give up on page 30 and saw it through till the end. My overall impression of this novel can be summed up by this single gif: (which, I admit, I have always wanted to use)