wow, depressing! The story took simultaneously too long and not long enough to reveal the protagonists' secrets. And I never quite connected with either one. ( )

I found this book a bit of a hard slog to be honest.
The story is very good but just so drawn out.

It is July 1940 set in a small Suffolk village.
11 year Lydia who had been evacuated to Wales returns home her Village and family home is empty.
A German soldier called Heiden also arrives at this house to hide out. He has arrived in England under the cover of a darkness originally on a secret mission.
This is the story of how Heiden slowly befriends Lydia and how he loses all his respect for the German War effort.

The book jumps back and forth so we get to know about Lydia's life and her love for her big Brother Alfie. Heiden wanted to be a musician and fell in love with a woman called Eva. Eva became a Nurse but as the War took hold in Germany he witnessed her being shot.
He also was on a mission in Norway where he met Lydia's Father he asked him loads of questions about his life,this gave him the idea to come to England and reinvent himself.
He let Lydia's Father go. He also killed some of his fellow German officers along the way.

Heiden and Lydia try to drive to the Cotswolds but are stopped by the Local Defence Volunteers there is a bit of a panic Shots are fired. Heiden runs off back to the house, Lydia follows him the British troops are on to him. ( )

A surprisingly valueless book. Jason Hewitt's The Dynamite Room is a thriller that doesn't thrill, a suspense piece that leaks its pressure on every page, a bottle episode without atmosphere, a sensory experience that feels aloof, a character study with its two main characters contradictory and poorly-drawn, and an original premise that determinedly follows the middle road.

The book offers nothing to root for. The main characters are an unconvincingly-voiced 11-year-old girl (who behaves like, and is sexualised like, a 15 or 16-year-old) and an unintentionally-bipolar and sociopathic German commando who freely admits to gang rape and to knifing people (on both sides) for personal advantage, yet we are expected to invest – even if ambiguously – in his 'redemption' arc as he imprisons this young girl. There is no plot: nothing makes sense until the final chapter, and even then the German's plan is bewilderingly nonsensical and wishy-washy.

Hewitt writes in a touchy-feely style that completely fails to invoke the claustrophobic setting, the desires of the characters, or a sense of storytelling. The importance of the 'dynamite room' of the title is never clear, and the tag-line has zero relevance to anything in the plot dynamic. This is a touch-and-go Creative Writing exercise given a few conventional publishing trappings and then funnelled out into the world, to meet an inflated top-down 'demand' for books about precocious, threatened children and a wispy, soft-focus view of World War Two. This is a book that makes every play at being a novel without being one and, for the reader, invoking only that confused 'uncanny valley' feeling you might get when looking at an android playing at being human. What the hell are we doing to our increasingly moribund literary culture, in consuming such ersatz material? ( )

A very we'll-written, atmospheric novel. However it is often more atmosphere than story. I found the initial premise hard to believe and the character of the German soldier was confused - one minute a ruthless nazi killer, the next a touchy freely musician. ( )

Very intense. Very moving. Another of the WWII books that I seem to be reading a lot of lately. Tears slid down my face at the end and with a huge sense of relief. ( )