Naomi's Gift - Martha Hall Kelly - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Martha Hall Kelly

SERIES: A Point In Time, #1

GENRE: Short Story, Historical Fiction

RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: An emotional short story set in the WWII concentration camps and written mostly in epistolary format. Needed more at the end, but still a decent tale.

Story Synopsis:

After her mother’s death, Aldona finds a tin filled with old letters. To her surprise, the letters are by some woman prisoner in Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp in northern Germany. Through the letters, Aldona discovers the story of how a baby girl was born to one of the women in the camp, and how all of them banded together to save the little one.

Most of the story comes to us in first person through the letters written to Aldona.

Plusses:

✔ At 53 pages, this is a somewhat quick read. You can easily complete it in one setting.

✔ The epistolary format is put to good use here. Each letter expresses the writer’s emotions well.

✔ The historical story about the baby will warm your heart as well as leave you teary-eyed. I liked reading how the women banded together to do the best they could for the baby.

✔ The author’s note at the end reveals some more insights about the factual background.

Minuses:

❌ The story didn’t feel convincing. I can still get a pregnant woman getting away undetected in a concentration camp for 9 months because of the severe malnutrition, but to have the baby’s carers working all day with no Nazi discovering the baby even once? It felt exaggerated. I must also wonder how the prisoners had access to so much stationery in the camp.

❌ The two points where the story isn’t epistolary – the initial part before Aldona discovers the letters, and the ending after she completes the final letter – are very vague and hence disappointing. It is understandable why we cannot know more about what happened, but the time gap between the last letter and the post-war situation is too wide for us to fill in all the dots. I was left with many questions. Maybe the epistolary style was partly to blame – after a point, the letters from the past had to come to an end, and that’s where we also stop learning the story. A regular storytelling approach would have worked better in ensuring completeness.

❌ Aldona’s character isn’t at all developed, so it is tough to feel for her. Her decision at the end seems abrupt and even ungrateful.

Overall, a heartwarming yet tragic read that might work better for historical fiction readers who aren’t too nitpicky.

I have heard of Martha Hall Kelly’s prowess in historical fiction, so I will try out her full-length works before I pronounce any opinion on her writing. Some authors are just better at longer works of writing, so maybe short fiction isn’t her forte.

This story comes from the ‘A Point in Time’ collection, which is available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers.