The Goddess of Warsaw by Lisa Barr

Publication May 28, 2024-Harper Perennial and Paperbacks-Mystery-Women’s Fiction-368pp

Book Summary

The Goddess Of Warsaw is an enthralling tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and those she loves, then and now.  

Los Angeles, 2005. Sienna Hayes, Hollywood’s latest It Girl, has ambitions to work behind the camera. When she meets Lena Browning, the enormously mysterious and famous Golden Age movie star, Sienna sees her big break. She wants to direct a picture about Lena’s life—but the legendary actor’s murky past turns out to be even darker than Sienna dreamed. Before she was a Living Legend, Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a Polish Jew whose life and family were destroyed by the Nazis.

Warsaw, 1943. A member of the city’s Jewish elite, Bina Blonski and her husband, Jakub, are imprisoned in the ghastly, cramped ghetto along with the rest of Warsaw’s surviving Jews. Determined to fight back against the brutal Nazis, the beautiful, blonde Aryan-looking Bina becomes a spy, gaining information and stealing weapons outside the ghetto to protect her fellow Jews. But her dangerous circumstances grow complicated when she falls in love with Aleksander, an ally in resistance—and Jakub’s brother. While Lena accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, she sacrifices much in the process.

Over a decade after escaping the horrors of the ghetto, Bina, now known as Lena, rises to fame in Hollywood. Yet she cannot help but be reminded of her old life and hungers for revenge against the Nazis who escaped justice after the war. Her power and fame as a movie star offer Lena the chance to right the past’s wrongs . . . and perhaps even find the happy ending she never had.

A gripping page-turner of one of history’s most heroic uprisings and an actress whose personal war never ends, The Goddess Of Warsaw is filled with secrets, lies, twists and turns, and a burning pursuit of justice no matter the cost.

Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

Forbidden love. Polish Resistance and Treblinka 1942. Survival and a Stradivarius. These elements are packed into Lisa Barr’s saga of the Warsaw Ghetto and the world of Hollywood in 2005. Lena Browning, an 85-year-old Hollywood star telling her life story to aspiring director, Sienna Hayes, lets the reader know, “There will be betrayal, deception, death, blood, and revenge.”

Lena’s past life as the Jewish blond, Bina Blonski, is revealed in Book 1, as Sienna records the gripping horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. This part of Bina’s life is intense and gut-wrenching, evoking primal survival instincts of fear, anger, resentment, and revenge. Readers get a feeling of short relief when Bina emerges in Hollywood, USA, becoming Lena Browning in Book 2, but then are immersed in the political world of Hollywood as Sienna and Lena make preparations for the “final scene” in Book 3. Lena’s life is filled with truth, lies, and forbidden, but true love. Revenge and Love. Which one wins in the end?

Powerfully captivating, forcibly convicting.