Daughters of the Labyrinth is a poignant story about a daughter who stumbles upon a family secret and discovers her mother’s dreadful experience as a Jew in Crete during WW2.

I devoured the book in just a few sittings. The plot is gripping and the pace is good. The prose is absolutely gorgeous, and I love how the author paints with words: the narrator Ri, a painter, observes people and objects with an artist’s eye and describes them beautifully by focusing on lines, shapes, colours, textures, light and shadows.

The premise of the book is interesting and relevant. The story is based on the persecution of Cretan Jews during WW2 and the personal stories of Jewish survivors. I appreciate how it introduced me to a part of holocaust history I didn’t know before, and how the author juxtaposes that with xenophobia in post-Brexit Britain and the current migration crisis in Greece.

There is just one thing that made me feel uncomfortable. I found Ri rather inconsiderate and self-centred at times. She somehow feels entitled to be angry at her mother for hiding her traumatic past from her children. She appropriates her mother’s past as her own and goes on to tell others the story without her mother’s consent. I know it is a narrative device for Ri to push for the story to be told, but the way she kept bullying her father and pressuring her mother felt like a series of assaults. Her reaction after hearing every chunk of her parents’ story is also rather juvenile, though she’s meant to be in her 60s (she wanted to bang her head against the wall after hearing the bit about Elvira, for example).

In any case, despite my annoyance at Ri, I still enjoyed the book tremendously and I would recommend it to readers who like a good historical fiction.

On starting this book I was a little concerned that it would be a Victoria Hislop clone - a book set in wartime Crete with a modern day twist of a family member discovering a family secret.

I needn't have worried, it was completely different and taught me a lot more about the island of Crete and it's past.
I thought that all of the threads did come together nicely and the story itself was fascinating, but I do have a couple of niggles...
Perhaps there was just one too many issues in the book? No spoilers but by the last revelation I did roll my eyes slightly! Also I thought that the introduction of events in 2020 were a little awkward, especially given how things have played out since the book was finished.

My last niggle was on the slightly too negative portrayal of Greece itself - the covering of things like medicine, electricity etc might have been true at the height of the economic recession but they don't quite echo the experiences I've had in the past few years..
All in all a good book and one I will be recommending to fans of Hislop.