A beautifully written story about two unfortunate children being swept up by the WWII, but also kind of underwhelming. The characters are pretty shallow,  French girl who is blind and likes books and a German boy who’s in an orphanage and likes engineering. Both are just drifting throught the book mainly doing things they are told to do, given they are children but for the main characters the lack of agency makes the characters pretty boring. The realities of being swept by the unfairness and unforgivingness of the war would have been more effective without being wrapped together with a magical realism plot of the cursed diamond. The contrasting viewpoints worked well, but flipping in with the climax of the story just seemed like a drag for me. My favorite parts were mostly the details, how people reacted to the war and how they tried to work against it, images of people on the  road, and how everybody reacted to the war in their own ways. But for a WWII literature, there are much better ones out there.