Book Review: The Lines We Leave Behind by Eliza Graham

 

Goodreads Summary: England, 1947: A young woman finds herself under close observation in an insane asylum, charged with a violent crime she has no memory of committing. As she tries to make sense of her recent past, she recalls very little.
But she still remembers wartime in Yugoslavia. There she and her lover risked everything to carry out dangerous work resisting the Germans—a heroic campaign in which many brave comrades were lost. After that, the trail disappears into confusion. How did she come to be trapped in a living nightmare?

As she struggles to piece together the missing years of her life, she will have to confront the harrowing experiences of her special-operations work and peacetime marriage. Only then can she hope to regain the vital memories that will uncover the truth: is she really a violent criminal…or was she betrayed?

Goodreads Rating: 3.96 stars with 9,800 ratings

Genre Listing: Historical Fiction, World War II, War, Mystery

Goodreads/Storygraph Challenge: 10/30 books

2025 Reading Challenge: #14 Read the book that's been on your TBR the longest (Find the entire challenge here)

Book Review:

Hello, Readers! I hope everyone is doing well on this frigid Tuesday. I don't have any significant life updates, which is nice. I started reading The Lines We Leave Behind by Eliza Graham to knock out #14 on the reading challenge. It was a Kindle First Read book that I've had forever. I finally finished it last night. 

I'm glad I'm done reading this story. It was a struggle for me. The story follows Maud in a psychiatric hospital after serving in WWII on secret missions. The premise is that she's supposed to remember a crime she committed, but she can't. She goes through and tells her Psychiatrist about her war service as a way to try and remember what happened. The first part of the book was a little hard to get into. The story bounces between her life as Maud and her secret identity, Amber. It wasn't initially clear that she was both Maud and Amber, making it hard to connect with her as a character. Toward the story's beginning, it seems like she understood it was just a persona, but at the end, it feels more like a dissociative identity. It just didn't feel very consistent. 

Once she gets back from her missions, the story moves really quickly. There were some twists and turns I wasn't expecting, which was nice and kept my momentum going for reading it. Without those, I don't know that I would have finished this book. It wasn't holding my interest very well. There was a lot about her treatment and miraculous recoveries that weren't believable or seemed like they didn't fit with the story's time period. For example, her initial Psychiatrist's treatment plan just seemed too modern for the era. I'm not an expert, however, so my limited knowledge could make me feel that way. 

Overall, I mostly wished the book was over. I couldn't connect with the story at all, and I only got through it because it fit #14 on the Reading Challenge. If you want to try it, it also works for the memory prompt.