The Secrets We Kept - Lara Prescott

 

Sometimes history sets down a series of events that include colorful characters, international espionage, romantic devotion, complicated and flawed heroines and heroes and it all sounds so fantastic, but when putting pen to paper, some of the magic of the real life humans does not get translated to the page. 

In theory, The Secrets We Kept should have been thrilling and heart breaking. And as a historically based novel about a famous author and his even more famous book, this novel should have been right at the top of my likes. But the rotating points of view and full chapters from a plural person narrator left two bland sides of a story that includes so much flavor individually.

So what happened? The Secrets We Kept centers around the publication of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. An epic love story spanning events in Russia from the Russian Revolution through World War II. Given the breadth of time and characters included in Zhivago it's impossible to write a succinct plot summary but suffice it to say, Yuri Zhivago is a physician and a poet, he has hard times, falls in love with Lara, war and famine and etc., and death. This is Russian literature after all. You want weddings and happiness look up Jane Austen (not a dig, I adore her). 

Anyway, because Russia at the time Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago was the USSR and Stalin was in charge, this novel was never going to see the light of day. The book included descriptions of Salinism, Collectivization, the Great Purge, and Gulags, and apparently that was a little too on the nose for the Soviet government so they were absolutely not going to let this get published. Then along came an Italian publisher who obtained a copy and published it in Italy and then quickly licensed the book into 18 other languages. This should have made Pasternak richer than Dan Brown after the DaVinci code, but he wasn't about to be able to accept foreign money for a book he was not allowed to publish in the first place.

So powerful was the USSR's dislike of the book that the CIA obtained a copy, had a thousand printed and then handed them out at the 1958 Brussels world's fair. They also made sure a copy made it into the hands of the Nobel committee. All of this was unknown until the CIA declassified some documents in 2014. 

Pasternak was awarded the Nobel, much to his dismay, the USSR's embarrassment, and the CIA's enjoyment. He was forced under threat to turn the award down. Then Premier Krushchev banned the book (although he later read it and liked it, duh) and Pasternak was made to scrape by until he died of lung cancer in 1960. His mistress and inspiration for Lara was arrested and imprisoned for four years for crimes related to the publication of the book.

Yikes. Look at all this drama! What good breeding ground for a novel. Except, when dealing with known facts, trying to create intrigue is just not intriguing. When someone can easily google the outcome of a story, it makes it hard to build tension. I'm talking more about the outcome of the CIA operation here, which was a large portion of the book but lacked a lot of the emotional weight that the Russian portion contained with telling the story from Olga Ivinskaya's point of view. Tales of human woe always contain tension if done right, and I really did feel a lot of that in the Olga parts. 

But the novel as a whole missed the emotional impact it was going for. There are chapters that are really well written, but then they are broken up by points of view from others that create for an uneven and unsatisfactory narrative. 

3/5 Stars. 

A Quiet Flame - Philip Kerr

There's a very thick thematic feeling that drapes itself over these Bernie Gunther novels and A Quiet Flame is no exception. When we last left Bernie Gunther, he was boarding a boat for Argentina in the un-esteemed company of Adolf Eichmann. Having eluded summary execution by an Israeli hit squad, Gunther is happy to be alive, even if he is using a borrowed name and identity.

Upon arrival in Argentina, his alter-ego's status as a former doctor gets him hauled before Juan Peron himself. In giving up his true identity to save himself from medical entanglement, Bernie finds himself recruited in another direction. It appears a teenage girl has been kidnapped and Bernie has both the detective skills and former-SS pedigree to find her.

Having been hired by the Argentinian secret police, Bernie sets about interviewing his old comrades in an attempt to find someone capable of kidnapping and murdering a teenager. This leads him to finally solve a similar case he worked on in 1932, before Hitler became Chancellor and the country well and truly started on a path to annihilation. In the meantime, an Jewish-Argentinian bombshell asks for help finding some missing Jewish relatives who were rounded up after entering the country illegally.

With acerbic wit and dark humor, Bernie ping pongs his way through one hypocritical situation to the next. No one is unscathed, even himself and he comes to terms with the enormity of the German collective crime, and his part in it.

Having very little historical knowledge of this time in Argentina (I haven't even watched the Evita movie) I found the plot here terribly fascinating. Excuse me while I go scour the bowels of Wikipedia until my curiosity is satiated. And really, bowels is an appropriate word when it comes to the figures involved in these stories.

4/5 Stars

Warlight - Michael Ondaatje

I've been sitting on this review all day because I felt a lot of things while reading Warlight that I wasn't sure I'd be able to succinctly describe. After a few days I'm more comfortable about how I felt about the book so here goes:

First off, I'd like to say that I listened to the audio version of this book and I believe this was a critical and exquisite mistake. Exquisite because the vocalist did a fantastic job and had a wonderful voice. Critical because the language of the novel, the dreamy quality and the trustworthiness of the narrator led to a really hard narrative to follow in audio format.

The story opens with our narrator, Nathaniel, thinking back upon a very formative period in his life during his early teen years when both of his parents left him and his sister, Rachel, in the care of strangers. Their father, an emotionally distant, blurry figure who, as an executive at Unilever has been called to relocate to the company's Singapore offices for a year. Their mother, Rose, has decided to accompany him for the year, sending the children to boarding school. Their London home is to be looked after by a boarder whom the children refer to as "The Moth." During the months after their father's departure and the start of school whereby their mother will leave, the children grow close to their mother, whom they have no real connection with, having lived with their grandparents during much of the war years.

Once they are ensconced at boarding school, both Nathaniel and Rachel determine they hate it and sneak out to return to their home. The Moth promptly visits the schools and has the children converted to daytime only students. It is once they are back home that Rachel discovers their mother's steamer trunk, carefully packed with all those Singapore gowns, tucked away in a corner of their basement. Both children feel bereft and abandoned. With no way to get in touch with their mother they are left to wonder at the true depths of their abandonment and their parents' deception.

Left to their own devices, Nathaniel and Rachel grow close to The Moth and his case of vaguely criminal friends who frequent the house. Nathaniel especially grows close to a once successful amateur underground boxer nicknamed The Pimlico Darter. While The Moth encourages Nathaniel to get his first real job, The Darter teaches Nathaniel about the back waterways and alleys of the Thames while they smuggle racing dogs of questionable provenance. Un-moored, Nathaniel strikes up a relationship with a girl whose real name he never knows and manages to become close to her while still keeping her at a distance.

And all of this was very interesting and Ondaatje's writing is really fantastic, but then... well the story changes and Nathaniel starts telling the story of his mother, for reasons I don't want to say in this review for risk of spoilers. And given the wonderful distance and mystery Ondaatje spends the first 1/3 of the book creating, the credibility of the knowledge of the last 2/3 is stretched and destroyed by what Nathaniel is able to share about his mother.

The novel is really 1/3 a telling of a child's story from a child's point of view, and 2/3 a telling of a child's story from an adult point of view. It brings up questions and vulnerabilities that are touching and deeply moving and asks us to look at our parents anew from the distance of hindsight and the earned wisdom of adulthood. But it doesn't undo the damage done and the hearts broken in accepting a new perspective.

So all this is to say there were things I really really loved about this book, but when it's all put together it left me wanting a more believable mechanism for getting to the heart of Rose's story without damaging Nathaniel's credibility.

3.5/5 Stars.

Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

This book came out quite a while ago and honestly I only picked it because it's narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris and after finishing Every Note Played, I wasn't quite ready to leave his voice. I knew nothing about the book, the plot, or even the true life events which inspired them. I'm not above reading novels about countries in which the author has no experience (I have read all these German detective Bernie Gunther novels by Phillip Kerr, who is British and liked them) but I do take them with a grain of salt because it is immensely different when you read a novel by a native of that country.

That being said, I read Child 44 with a quiet sort of fascination as it details not only the actions of a methodical and sadistic serial killer but also the casual cruelties of Stalin-era police abuses and political paranoia. And honestly the parts about the Soviet apparatus and why it made it so difficult to hunt for a serial killer were more interesting than the crime facts itself because honestly, the brutal killing of children is not really something I like to read about. 

The book starts with a cat and a woman in Ukraine in the 1930s, during the famine sparked by forcing everyone onto collective farms. People are starving and dying. And a woman, somehow, still owns a cat. The cat is let go when the woman lets go on her desire to live. But a boy living nearby sees the cat and makes a plan with his brother to trap and eat it. During their trip into the woods, the braver older brother is struck by a man and taken away. 

We then jump to twenty years later. The "Great Patriotic War" is over and Leo Demidov is a ranking MGB officer who is tasked with finding an alleged spy. In tracking down the spy he is forced to confront the banality of evil existing in his duties as well as the shaky foundations upon which his investigations and executions have been based. He also must convince a grieving family that they cannot speak about the murder of their five year old son, because murder does not exist in Soviet Russia. It cannot. People have no reason to murder, being housed and fed, so any suggestion of murder is the spreading of anti-soviet sentiment.

Trapped within this circular reasoning, unable to name and investigate the murder, Leo goes so far as to threaten the family into silence. He is then asked to denounce his own wife, which he refuses to do, and is demoted and sent to a remote outpost. Upon arriving at the outpost he comes upon two children similarly murdered. He must then decide to what length he is willing to go to investigate the murders and to catch the killer. 

The events of the book are loosely based on the most notorious Russian serial killer of all time, Andrei Chikatilo, who evaded capture for decades as he killed as many as 56 women and children. He was convicted and sentenced to death for 52 of these murders in October 1992 and executed in February 1994. He was arrested several times over the course of his killing spree, but bungled investigations and shoddy police work led to his release and continued destruction until he was finally arrested in November 1990. 

Chikatilo's mug shot.

Everyone you care about in this novel has a sad and complicated back story that informs their decisions, and I really liked how the author teased out each of these issues in time. I may have to read the next book in the series to find out what happens to Leo later on.

4/5 Stars.

The One from the Other - Philip Kerr

The One from the Other was a little all over the place. I still like Bernie Gunther and his wit. In this installment it's no different. 

The story begins with Bernie travelling to Palestine with a young Adolph Eichmann. Bernie is there to set up a bank account and property for a Jewish business owner emigrating with the assistance/urging of the SD. Eichmann is there to see if he can make a few alliances that will help Germany strategically. Then we fast forward to after the war and Bernie is living in Dauchau at his father-in-law's hotel while his wife, Kiersten is in a mental hospital following a break down. 

Following Kiersten's death, Bernie travels to Munich to set up shop as a private investigator again. However, the clients who keep coming in are looking to help former SS war criminals awaiting German amnesty. Bernie doesn't' have a lot of enthusiasm for the work, but when a good looking woman shows up trying to find her missing husband, he doesn't ask many questions to figure out his motives. This leads to some further violence and well... the plot gets really twisty and turn-y after that. 

I still enjoyed reading/listening to this book, but at times I felt the history lessons were turning into filler. 

3/5 Stars. 

The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

This excellent short book was more poetry than prose. There's no main character in The Buddha in the Attic, which tells the collective stories of young women brought from Japan in the 1930s to wed men they had never met. Promised lives of ease and comfort in America, most of these women were gravely disappointed, but scratched out a life in the fields of California's agriculture industry until they saved enough (or didn't) to buy a piece of land of their own. 

Or they married shop keepers in the J-towns of the cities in which they arrived and lived their lives serving other Japanese immigrants within a small tight-knit community. Or they served as housemaids to oblivious, or caring, or cruel white people. 

And they had children that died, farmed, prospered, and left them (or didn't). And then they were awarded for their hard work by being rounded up and transported to camps on suspicion of enemy activity. And there their story ends and is taken up by the white people who didn't notice the Japanese until they were gone, carrying forth a half-hearted effort to get answers from the government as to the disappearance of their neighbors.

This little book was so well written and lovely and sad. I really enjoyed it.

4/5 Stars. 

Beneath a Scarlet Sky - Mark Sullivan

Let's be clear... the real man, Pino Lella gets all the STARS. All of them. He lived an amazing life. Did some amazing things. Struggled with PTSD (undiagnosed) and still managed to create loving children and live a life after WWII.

But the writing? Oh the writing of this book, the awkward dialogue, the hyperbolic metaphors, the repetitive clichés - that gets 2 Stars. The writing was really a mess. The book was about 100 pages too long. I feel like Pino deserved a better, cleaner narrative than the tangled mess that was finally published. The compelling nature of the story alone carries this novel to the end, were it not for Pino's incredible story, this would be a difficult one to finish.

So for the good stuff - Pino Lella was a young man living in Milan during WWII and the German invasion following Mussolini's ouster. Didn't know Mussolini was ousted? Me either. This book did provide a lot of unknown detail for me about the role Italy played in WWII and what happened to the Italians. Anyway, Pino is living in Milan when the city begins to be bombed by the Allies in 1943. Desperate to keep him safe, his mother and father send Pino to Casa Alpina, a mountain monastery/summer camp run by Father Re. Father Re immediately begins training Pino to make the mountain crossing into Switzerland, it turns out so that Pino can ferry Jewish refugees to safety. Over the course of approximately 10 months, Pino leads dozens of such refugees over the mountains through harrowing conditions of snow and avalanche.

Upon returning to Milan from Casa Alpina, a now 17 year old Pino is in danger of being drafted into the Italian army and sent to the front lines, where the German high-command is more than happy to place the Italian boys in the front row. Again in order to keep him safe, Pino's parents convince him to enlist in the Organization Todt, a non-German Nazi organization. After Pino is injured in the bombing of the Milan train station he meets General Leyers, the German in charge of the Nazi occupation of Italy. General Leyers is pretty evil, but also a little weird. Anyway, Pino becomes Leyers driver and in doing so acts as a spy for the Italian resistance. One day, as he is dropping off General Leyers at his girlfriend, Dolly's home, Pino runs into Dolly's maid, Anna, a woman he saw at the beginning of the bombardment and hasn't been able to stop thinking about (seriously she gets mentioned a bunch in the first couple hundred pages of the book and it's not clear why because it happens A LOT).

Anna and Pino fall in love with the backdrop of espionage and war and bombing and the Holocaust. Pino sees some pretty sick stuff - including the execution of his cousin, the enslavement of Jews, and the deportation of children. Finally the war ends and Pino is out partying when he discovers that Dolly and Anna have been arrested as collaborators. And.... well I'll leave the last few bits a surprise.

I was sincerely impressed with all that Pino did and lived, but again just disappointed in the quality of the writing. I'm sure this book has been a big success because of Pino, but it really is a shame that it wasn't given a better "script" as it were.


3/5 Stars.

A German Requiem - Philip Kerr

It's 1948. The War is over, and at first, we're not really sure what Bernie has been up to that whole time. We do know that he has a wife, but it doesn't seem to make him as happy as he thought he could be during the last book where he felt his own biological clock ticking.

What is clear, is that post-WWII Berlin of A German Requiem is not a good place to be even BEFORE the blockade. Bernie has to navigate the various occupied zones and life again as a private detective and he's not doing that great of a job at any of it. Meanwhile, his wife Kirsten is waiting tables at an American bar and coming home with unexplained gifts.

Bernie is approached by a Russian colonel with a proposition, go to Vienna and clear the name of his former police colleague Emile Becker who stands accused of murdering an American officer. The money and his home life lead Bernie to agree and so we get to see Bernie a little of his normal game, in a new city full of more uncertainty. And as the story progresses we learn that he was drafted from the police squad into an SS regiment, requested a transfer as the mass-murdering of civilians was not his style, and fought on the Russian front until captured and held in a Gulag. On the way to his execution by the Russian government, he escapes and makes his way back to Berlin.

But it seems the war, and the SS just can't leave Bernie be. He's entirely too moral and this makes him an unknown player in post-war espionage. The book is very well done and I always appreciate the final twists and turns that I don't really see coming. I also really liked the book's treatment of collective guilt and the shades of truth that exist in that examination. Women again don't fair very well in this story, even where they do try to have some agency of their own.

The audio version continues to amuse me as Christopher Lee narrates Bernie with such a cynical British accent, but the Russian and American characters got accents all their own. Poor British sounding German Bernie.


3.75/5 Stars.

The Pale Criminal - Phillip Kerr

I

know I haven't been doing as many reviews lately. My time with the audiobooks has been seriously curtailed this last month. Back in August a friend of mine told me she was coming to Nashville to watch some live tapings of her favorite podcasts and asked if I'd be interested in attending. I agreed and set off to download a couple episodes so I could become familiar enough not to embarrass myself at the tapings.

Well, turns out one podcast, The Adventure Zone, was a 69 episode narrative odyssey so my audiobooks took a backseat for all of September and most of October as I attempted to absorb 80 hours of audio in preparation for the show. Then, coming off the finale episode, I had one of those weeks where nothing else seemed appealing. Have you ever finished a book series like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings that left you so absorbed for so long that everything else seemed dull and pale in comparison? That is what The Adventure Zone did to me. That a graphic novel is coming out in July is delightful, but I'm really feeling sad that the journey is over. If you are into fantasy fiction at all, you should check it out. The podcast got better and better as it went along (check out this write-up in the Austin Chronicle).

But, alas, I now have a longer commute, and aside from re-listening to some of my favorite episodes (which I have done), there seemed nothing for it but to get back on the audio horse and start listening again. So I turned back to the Berlin Noir series and Bernie Gunther.

The Pale Criminal kicks off in 1938, a year or so after the last installment in the series. Bernie now has a partner, a character whose name I won't even try to spell, and at the beginning of the story, a new client. The client is a rich woman with a troubled son. The mother is being blackmailed for the return of lewd letters the son wrote to his therapist. Exposure of such a homosexual nature could result in a death sentence in Nazi Germany. Bernie agrees to find out who is doing the blackmailing and recover the rest of the letters.

In the meantime, it looks like the head of the criminal police force also needs Bernie's help in uncovering a serial murderer who is kidnapping, raping, and killing young German girls in Berlin. The investigation of which unravels quite a few insidious plots along the way.

I really appreciated the skill with which the two mysteries were wrapped together. There was so much richness added regarding the background of the times and the environment in which Bernie is trying to solve these crimes. Real characters like Karl Maria Wiligut, Otto Rahn, Himmler and Heydrich play large roles in the story. And because of the murky details surrounding Rahn's death, and Wiligut's "retirement" from the SS, Kerr has a lot of room to work in the details of those circumstances to his own fictional devices.

This continues to be an excellent series.


4/5 Stars.

March Violets - Philip Kerr

Bernie Gunther is a private detective in the volatile world of Berlin in 1936. With the backdrop of the Olympic summer games, Bernie is asked by steel magnate, Herman Six (sorry for the spelling errors, I listened to this one), to find out what happened to a diamond necklace stolen from a safe the night his daughter was shot and killed while in bed with her husband - before their home was set aflame. In the mix are the March Violets, newcomers to the Nazi party with something to prove and status to gain. 

Bernie unravels more than he bargained for as he tries to navigate the changing landscape of power in the Third Reich. Goring, Himmler and Goebbels all make brief appearances to help cement the reader in time. 

As far as noir goes, this novel is spot on. A devastatingly beautiful film actress, secret motives, guns for hire, etc etc, this book has it all. I was able to figure out a very important piece of the story before Bernie, but the plot went in such wild directions afterwards that I was pleasantly surprised by later developments. There is a bit of melancholy which the period evokes that can never be done away with. But Bernie's dogged determination and cynical viewpoint help to move the story along.

It's a bit incongruous to have the book read by John Lee, who is British, and the story occur in Berlin. Lee is a great narrator, but at times it was jarring to hear a cockney accent on a German thug. Written by the British Kerr, the book is one stepped removed from the realism or authenticity a German author may have given to the story - as the jokes are more heavily in the British style of humor than German. 

4/5 Stars. 

In the Garden of Beasts - Erik Larson

In Greek mythology, Cassandra of Troy was given the gift of prophecy but was cursed by Apollo so that when she spoke her prophecies, no one would believe her. Cassandra see the future destruction of Troy and despite her warnings of the Greeks hiding within the gifted Trojan Horse, she is not believed. The city is sacked, Cassandra herself is captured, raped, and becomes a concubine to King Agamemnon before she is killed by Agamemnon's wife and her lover. The Greeks really have some uplifting stories, no? 

All this is to say is that sometimes life is unkind to figures of prophecy, or those that are able to discern outcomes before a wider populace can see them. William Dodd, Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937 was one such figure. A quiet college professor, Dodd was Roosevelt's eighth or ninth choice to serve as ambassador to Nazi Germany. It seems other men weren't interested in risking their diplomatic careers by stepping into such a politically sensitive arena. But that didn't mean that those same men weren't eager to criticize Dodd for the job he was doing. 

Not fitting the typical mold of an ambassador, Dodd tried to live within his ambassador's salary and clung to principle over traditional trappings of statesmanship. He refused to attend the large Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. He gave a rousing speech of the dangers of autocratic leadership. He cultivated relationships with moderate elements of the Nazi party. All this while receiving the scorn and derision of the State Department officials in Washington who were intent on ignoring Dodd's warnings of potential calamity in Germany and insisting that Dodd remain vigilant in attempts to secure American debt owed from the previous World War. 

William Dodd 1869-1940

Dodd was way ahead of everyone in understanding Hitler's intentions. And Larson spends 90% of the book engaged in Dodd's first 18 months as Ambassador where Dodd's own hopes and optimism for a moderating force within Germany are diminished and then extinguished as Hitler wraps himself in greater layers of power. That a hundred or more (counts vary by historian) members of the party were killed in one evening at Hitler's command without trial or conviction was an event that shocked Dodd and should by all accounts have shocked and angered the world. But Hitler saw that he was able to get away with this action and so was able to more steadily increase his own ambitions while the world sat idly by. That Dodd was scorned by the State Department "leadership" for this is embarrassing and some part of me hopes those gentlemen felt their own comeuppance at being so terribly wrong. 

Larson does a good job creating a sense of foreboding and generally building tension as Dodd would have felt it. The last chapters seemed rushed, as I would have liked more analysis of Dodd's actions following the full outbreak of the war. I think some of the earlier material could have been trimmed down in order to address these aspects as well. But overall this book was highly informative, impeccably researched, and readable.

4/5 Stars

City of Thieves - David Benioff

This was can't put down good. The premise is a grandson asking his grandfather about the war. You know, THE war, WWII. The grandfather was a Soviet citizen in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) at the time and the grandson wants to know what his grandfather did during the war.

So we get the grandfather's version of what he did. Lev Beniov lives in The Kirov, an apartment building in the outer ring of Leningrad. He serves on the building's fire brigade, there to put out any fires should the building get shelled during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. One evening, while standing watch on the top of his building with his friends, Lev spots a dead German paratrooper falling from the sky. As the city has been starving for months and people are dying from starvation daily, the youths figure the German paratrooper may have food on his person and decide to be the first ones there to investigate the possibility. Except, as an enemy soldier in Leningrad, the dead body is now government property and taking anything from the body would be considered "looting" and stealing of government property. 

When he pauses to help a friend running from the police, Lev is caught and taken to a Leningrad prison. Sometime in the night he is joined by an army deserter, Kolya. The head of the NKVD gives them the task of finding 12 eggs in the next five days for his daughter's wedding cake. Lev and Kolya then go about the impossible task of procuring a dozen eggs in a food wasteland. 

It is Kolya's indomitable spirit through the Lev's pessimistic lens, that carries this story from horror to humor and back again in endless and glorious cycles as the two undertake their quest. I didn't want this book to end.

5/5 Stars. 

At the Water's Edge - Sarah Gruen

Thank goodness for clear-headed Scots, or this book would have been a real mess. Maddie, her husband Ellis, and their friend Hank decide to travel to Drumnadrochit, a small town on the shores of Loch Ness, during the middle of WWII to capture evidence of "The Monster." See, both Hank and Ellis are 4F, unfit for service in the war due to flat footedness and color blindness, respectively. Two otherwise able bodied men about town, Ellis and Hank are increasingly uncomfortable with the judgments they get from others. 

This all comes to a head on New Year's Eve, when Ellis, Hank and Maddie get so drunk at a party that they misbehave and Ellis claims his father's spotting of the Loch Ness Monster many years before was a sham. This is apparently a family sore spot, as his father claims to have photographic evidence of his sighting, but later journalists claimed the photos were a hoax. Word about this gets back to Ellis' parents, with whom he and Maddie live, and his father decides to cut Ellis off and kick him and his wife out of the house. 

I should mention at this point that Ellis has nowhere to go with his wife because HE'S A HORRIBLE PERSON. Seriously, the guy is THE WORST. It's obvious from very early on in the book. So Hank and Ellis book passage for the three of them across the ocean amid u-boat sinkings and all so Ellis can prove there is a monster and redeem his father and family's honor. The arrive at an Inn and act like completely spoiled brats because during a war there isn't anything better to eat for breakfast than porridge. 

There's a bunch of whining on the part of Maddie as she has no idea how she'll survive if Ellis leaves her at the Inn on her own. But eventually, she becomes more likeable by whining less and the two women, Anna and Meg, that work at the Inn befriend her. They teach Maddie how to do her own hair, and basically be a decent human being, all the while HORRIBLE Ellis and slightly less horrible Hank run around completely oblivious. 

But you know what's not oblivious, Ellis has a real thing for Hank. And when it turns out that Ellis got to marry Maddie due to the result of a coin toss, it's not all that surprising that the arrangement suited Ellis, who barely shows interest in his wife, and would rather spend time with Hank. No one else seems to say this, but at some point it becomes clear that everyone finally gets it. And at that point, I had a Dixie Chicks moment and knew that "Ellis had to die." I mean, it gets to the point that the only solution is for Ellis to die. 

The rest of the story leading up to will he or won't he die is a bit predictable. But the stakes are raised for our Maddie and the owner of the Inn, a war hero named Angus who broods in the background smolderingly. 

I think I'd say this book was 3.5 stars, but it gets 4 because Maddie finally became a likeable character about 40% of the way through the book.

4/5 Stars. 

The Book of Harlan - Bernice McFadden

It's February and for Black History Month, I wanted to read something from an African American author and also something about Black History. The Book of Harlan is written by Bernice McFadden, an award winning African American author of nine critically acclaimed novels. The average Goodreads score on this book was 4.1 which is pretty fantastic. 

So let's start with what's working in this book. McFadden's prose is well done and the first 1/4 of the book detailing Harlan's parents, Sam and Emma Elliott, who meet in Macon, Georgia and then after becoming pregnant with Harlan (much to the displeasure of Emma's preacher father), move around the country looking for the right fit, while the grandparents bring up Harlan. Finally, in Harlan's fourth year, Sam and Emma return to Macon for Harlan, having found their niche in 1920s Harlem. The pacing and the writing in this section of the book was the best part about the entire book. Even the parts that followed about Harlan's childhood and early adulthood in Harlem, playing in jazz bands and travelling the country was well done. And then, well then stuff started to get weird.

So about the midpoint of the book, when, in 1940, Harlan goes to Paris to play the jazz clubs there, unkowningly having fathered twin sons in Brooklyn, the suspense of the book started to ratchet up. When Harlan and his bandmate Lizard are picked up after curfew during the Nazi occupation of Paris, they are swept off to Buchenwald. Here I thought the book was going to settle in, and really delve into what it meant to be a black American in a German concentration camp. So I was completely surprised when this only took up a little more than two chapters. Much of this section of the book was Lizard's back story, which came a little too late as we'd already been introduced to Lizard for several chapters and well, then like many characters in this book, we never see him again. And although what happens to Lizard is terrible, he's in a concentration camp, you can probably figure it out, and it's supposed to be incredibly damaging to Harlan, there's something that is missing in the elements to give it a great emotional weight. 

When Harlan returns to his parent's home, he's completely broken and suffering from PTSD for several years, until he isn't and all of a sudden is out womanizing again. He moves to New Jersey with his parents, plays in some clubs, then all of a sudden his parents are killed in a car accident and he's once again devastated. He takes a job in Brooklyn as a superintendant of a building. Great, I thought, he's going to end up meeting his children finally, since the book spent a significant portion of time on the mother of his children and her family, but no. Instead of his children, Harlan finds Ilse Koch, the notorious wife of a Nazi administrator of Buchenwald who took sadistic pleasure in torturing prisoners in her husband's camp. Ilse Koch has taken refuge in the United States, disguised as recluse Andrew Mailer. (Except Ilse Koch in reality was tried twice for war crimes in Germany and committed suicide in prison in 1967 at the age of 60). 

Harlan, upon finding Ilse, strangles her to death and then turns himself into the police. Conveniently, the police detective who takes his statement has a wife who was also a prisoner at Buchenwald so he takes Harlan out the back door and sets him free, giving him all the money in his wallet and telling Harlan to make a new life somewhere. Harland decides to go to Macon, and then the book ends. YES! It ends there! 

So about what kind of fell flat for me: the book takes on too much. There are too many characters who show up to ground the story into factual time and place, but their factual stories get distorted by the narrative into untrue endings (Ilse Koch). 

There are also too many characters who are included, described in detail, only to be never seen again. The fact that we never know what happens to Harlan's twin sons was kind of a big gaping hole in the narrative. Yes, okay Harlan never met them, so if you take the story from only Harlan's perspective, then he didn't know what happened to them either, BUT in that vein, he never knew they existed in the first place, and he certainly didn't know anything about the family of the woman he slept with to make those children in the first place, but we had loads of details about those individuals in the story. It's almost as if they ceased to exist after the interesting portions of their own narratives were used up. 

The dialogue at times worked against the story. McFadden can get into a good rhythm of prose wherein the story flows well and the plot is driven forward. When dialogue is used for this purpose it has less effect and comes out awkwardly. 

Lastly, the scope of time taken on in this book was too great. Less time was spent on really interesting or complicated issues than were probably warranted given their weight and importance in the life of the characters. 

Basically I thought the first half of the book was pretty good and the book would have rated higher if the second half would have included mostly Buchenwald with a bit of the later life wrapped up at the end. The murder of Ilse Koch in the final chapters seemed an effort to create a dazzling ending where one wasn't really needed. This is a man who survived four years in a concentration camp, that struggle, and the changes it made in him, and how it redefines how we look at victims of the Holocaust should have been enough. That it wasn't is somehow telling on how this book fell short.

2/5 Stars.

The Boys in the Boat - Daniel James Brown

So many great things to say about The Boys in the Boat. This book has been on my "to-read" shelf for quite a while and I'm glad I finally came around to it as I really enjoyed it.

The book tells the story of the 9-man crew who won gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The story begins in 1933 with Joe Rantz arriving at the University of Washington's boat house in Seattle. He, and a hundred more freshmen are there to try out for the freshman crew team. At this point Joe has already overcome adversity in his life - being abandoned twice by his widowed and remarried father to LITERALLY fend for himself as a young teen. How this is possible is just completely beyond my sense of understanding people and I was deeply saddened for him.

But Joe starts to find himself and trust in others through the task of rowing, and working with a team to win. Through Joe we are introduced to the other members of the crew, coxswain Bobby Moch, Roger Morris, Shorty Hunt, stroke Don Hume, Johnny White, Stub McMillan, Chuck Day, and Gordy Adams. How this group of men came to be together through coach Al Ulbrickson's tinkering is laid out well by the story. 

Brown provides excellent surrounding facts and circumstances to set the stage in which the men would row. The tactics of Hitler and Goebbels to have Germany appear as a legitimate civilized country amid the systematic oppression and eventual murder of jews, homosexuals, gypsies, catholics and political opponents, and the United States own troubles during the depression, including the crippling poverty experienced by several members of the crew.

The story is beautifully and faithfully told. And having never rowed, I cared deeply about the men and really felt I understood the mechanics of rowing. And, despite knowing the outcome of the medal race, I found my heart rate increase when it came to the chapters detailing the races. I knew they would win, but I was worried for them because the odds did not look good. That they triumphed over so much was so lovely and uplifting. 

I wish I had met them.

5/5 Stars

The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah

This poor book was one that I received from the library in the middle of listening to something else, then tried to rush through in a few days, then realized it wouldn't happen, then waited three weeks for it to come back around so I could finish it. But I'm so glad I finished it - so very glad.

This is a story of two French sisters during World War 2 who make their own contributions to the resistance effort. Vienne is the older sister, with a daughter of her own and a husband at the front. Isobelle is the younger, more impulsive and impetuous sister. After the death of their mother at a young age, the two girls are estranged from each other and their alcoholic father. Isobelle grows up angry and desperate for love and notoriety. At the start of the war she is impatient to make her mark. She becomes "The Nightingale" ushering downed Allied pilots across the Pyrenees and into Spain to freedom.

Vienne is fearful for her child and her home. A German officer is billeted at her home during the occupation and Vienne must be careful of everything she says and does. Through the heartbreaking moments - and there are many many heartbreaking moments - the sisters' courage, shown in two decidedly different manners, is what carries the story. The ending was a bit too predictable and saccharine in comparison with the rest of the novel, but it didn't take away too much enjoyment from the reading.

I cried. Yeah yeah, I'm a softy. But the emotional moments were bought and paid for by the characters so they earned it. I really enjoyed this book and how it highlights the efforts of women during WWII. I can't wait to visit Paris again.

4/5 Stars.

The Lake House - Kate Morton

On a recommendation from my sister - who almost never steers me wrong - I picked up The Lake House, as I was in need of a new audio book for training for this 1/2 marathon (two more weeks folks).  I was a bit astonished to see a run time of 21 hours though! To put this in perspective, my average book for running is about 10-11 hours. This meant I'd be "reading" this for about three weeks. (Actually it took me more than a month - ouch).

So I settled in for a long story. And it was long. But also good. I liked the writing, even when Morton did get a little long winded. The story is framed by Sadie Sparrow, a London detective who is on administrative leave following a press leak regarding an investigations she was assigned to looking into the disappearance of Maggie Bailey.

As a concession to her partner, Sadie goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandfather, Bertie on holiday. She can't get the Bailey case out of her mind and wonders if it has anything to do with a recent letter she received from the baby she gave up for adoption as a teenager. Layers of several mysteries that are woven together.

To distract herself from all of this, Sadie takes up a keen interest in the Lake House she discovers while running. Turns out that the family that lived there moved shortly after a tragedy in 1933. The tragedy? The disappearance of an 11 month old boy, Theo.

The story then vacillates between Sadie's story in 2003, to 1933 and before told through the eyes of Alice and Elinor Edyvane (yeah sorry, I'm not sure if I'm spelling that right, I only listened to the book). It turns out Theo's disappearance hinges on the family secrets of several of the Edyvane family's individual members. The story gives away just enough to keep you guessing throughout, until the end, when it all starts to fall together and the reader has quite the jump start on Sparrow. I started to lament that she might not be a very good detective after all.

While Morton is certainly long on supposition and story-telling to the point where you don't really care to hear all the details of the moth eaten area rug that serves no purpose in plot - what she does end up giving you is very full character development. Sadie, Alice and Elinor are complete characters, with back story, motivation, failures, character flaws and all the rest. So the completion of the novel - a rounding up of both the Edyvane and Bailey cases, while maybe a bit eye-rollingly coincidental and predictable, is none-the-less very satisfying.

4/5 Stars.

All the Light we Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

Lovely from beginning to end. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The narrative follows two teenagers during World War II, blind Marie-Laure of Paris, France and Werner Pfennig of Germany. Both characters overcome obstacles and deal with their own limitations (Marie's physical, Werner's one of character) where time and the machinery of war eventually lead them to meet. 

The chapters dealing with Werner's schooling at an elite political school and the brutal treatment of the students by the instructors were exceptionally well written and devastating at the same time. In particular, the school sections of Werner's narrative focus on his friendship with Frederick, a boy who "sees things that others do not." Ultimately Frederick's ability to stand outside of the events and refuse to be a part of the cruel system make him a target. I won't get into specifics of what Werner does or does not do, but I will say that at this point in the story, he's not a hero. 

I held out hope for the ultimate happy ending but was not disappointed when it did not happen. 

The chapters are incredibly short, giving this book a fast reading feel despite the 500+ page length. Intricately woven, the short chapters bounce through time and location but surprisingly it was not difficult to follow and was well laid out developing the characters even as we knew how their worlds would ultimately collide. 

I don't want to give away too much of the plot but both the main two characters and the minor characters are so well written and developed that it's an astounding feat. I can't wait to read more from this author.

5/5 Stars.