Danny Scheinmann - Random Acts of Heroic Love

Reviewed by showhost on 20th November 2008:
I found this article by the author on his blog:
'Both my parents are Jewish immigrants ' my book Random Acts of Heroic Love is loosely based on my dad's dad, who was captured by the Russians in the first world war. He died of kidney failure when Dad was three. Dad was brought over to Manchester from Germany just one week before the second world war broke out, as part of the Kindertransport. And his mum was supposed to follow him over to this country, but she never made it. She was killed in Auschwitz. He never knew what happened to her until he got a letter from the Red Cross a few years later.
My mum came to the UK from Hungary when the Russians invaded in 1956. She had to swim across the Danube to escape. Maybe it was because they'd both been through so much that they found it difficult to get angry with me and David (my brother). As far as they were concerned, the most important thing was happiness
When I was 26, I was travelling around South America with my girlfriend and we were involved in a bus crash. She was killed, but I survived ' again, it was an experience that formed part of the book. When I got back to England, the first person I turned to was David'
This would explain a lot about his book as a lot of what happened to his grandparents and himself are in the book and told with such feeling. The book made me cry within the first 4 pages as he grieved over the loss of his Elani, his love. You could feel the pain in his heart. It is two parrallel stories, one set in 1917 during the Great War and the other in the 1990's. I didn't understand the significance of all the doodling at the beginning of each chapter but by the end of the book it made sense. Near the end of the book I lost track of who were the Bolshoviks and the other fighting factions but it doesn't detract from the wretched conditions the soldiers were in or their fight for survival against all odds.
I think everybody who has read this book has enjoyed it. (see Malcolm Martlands review for a more indepth review)