That's... that's a lot. Good golly.

When you said that having joy is an act of resistance, it really stuck with me. I think about that a lot now. ❤️‍🩹🙏🏼

The sheer irony is that I have a story idea kicking around in my head with the same basic structure, but the past would be way more recent, like the ’70s or ’80s. Dunno if I'm ever going to be able to write it, but it is funny that I still have the same idea when I've just been railing about it. 😂

And because WWII is... erm, not my thing... I have zero interest in these books, lol. With no offense to the books themselves or to the authors. I'm sure they're lovely stories and good writers. But yeah, zero interest.

I suppose I've come across the basic structure of "younger person meets older person with secrets and finds out/helps resolve things" before, but I've never seen it so persistent with regard to a specific gender for both characters and a specific time period for the older character.

Who started this, and did anybody decide it was a thing? Authors can't be writing these in a vacuum, can they? They have to know that other ones are out there, don't they?

Or is this a wider subgenre of historical fiction, of which I am only aware of the WWII examples? 👀

I couldn't enjoy the taste, then! 😂