![]() Instead, I remained in my sunny kitchen in the Valley with a nice plate of hummus. “You have never been so hungry you have never been so cold,” reads the opening line of Chapter 1, and believe me, I was ready to share all the epic wartime fear and wretchedness that Benioff has to offer, was keen to sneak behind enemy lines through frostbitten Soviet woods along with Lev, the book’s teenage narrator. ![]() How is it possible, then, that “City of Thieves” left me so thoroughly and discouragingly unmoved? Really, everything a reader could hope for in a buddy story set during the German army’s siege of Leningrad during World War II. It imagines the absurdities and horrors endured by people caught in one of history’s most lethal moments. ![]() DAVID BENIOFF’S second novel (after “The 25th Hour,” which Spike Lee directed for the screen) features a snappy plot, a buoyant friendship, a quirky courtship, an assortment of menacing bad guys, an atmosphere that flickers between grainy realism and fairy-tale grotesquerie and a grim but irrepressible sense of humor. ![]()
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