I just can't with these fantastical fantasy  books that so many people I really like just love.  This bizarre story of a world sort of like ours but not really was just weird.  It felt unnecessarily complicated, as if unexpected and impossible things were just added to the story for no real reason.  Similar to other books I have hated, like Going Postal, Piranesi, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and  Small Gods, there just wasn't anything here that called to me or drew me in.  I just could not suspend disbelief, get invested in the characters, or care about what happened.  I had a hard time even paying attention for a lot of it, even though I was traveling and thus had more mental bandwidth available to focus on the storyline.

Do not recommend.

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It took a long time for this book to warm up for me. Having read  a good bit about the experience of women in Iran under the Shah and the Ayatollah, I thought the story was going to be a fairly superficial account of the regression of an entire country--the relevance of which is not lost on me at this moment in time, but also not something I felt like I being preached to about. 

However, it turned out that this was just the backdrop of the actual story, which took a long time to be developed in the narrative, but the story itself was actually so much richer and more complex than this initial scene setting let on.  It is at its root the story of a lifelong, imperfect friendship, of the waxing and waning of closeness, of hurting people because you are young or immature or weaker than you wish you were, and of longing to return to easier times. It is a story of the cost of being called to activism and a story of staying to fight and fleeing to survive in times of political turmoil and in the face of oppressive state violence.  I loved the complex themes of redemption, connection, and reconnection and I always love a complex story about friendships, which this one is.
Recommend.
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I am less and less a fan of this newly popular genre in which an author selects a person in history about which there is a small amount of historical data and then builds an entirely fictional world around the their life to tell a story.  I really started to notice this trend with The Personal Librarian, which I quite enjoyed.  However, in that case, I knew absolutely nothing about Bella de Costa Greene, who was JP Morgan's personal librarian.  In this case, though, the author writes an entirely fictitous account of Martha Ballard's life.  Ballard was an 18th century American midwife who recorded her life in a personal journal that was published in the 1990s, called A Midwife's Tale.  I read the book in college and it certainly stuck with me all these many years later. 
When I read a 50 Bookish Friends recommendation, I do no research ahead of time. I don't read the book jacket or a summary of the story  I love that when I start the book, I have no idea what I am getting into.  It could be a self-help book, a political memoir, science fiction, or truly anything.  I don't even check to see if it is fiction or non-fiction, although sometimes once I am into it a ways, I do check this much.  In this case, though, as I was reading along, I thought the story sounded really familiar and when her name was used, I was certain that I had read the book before, even though it came out in 2023 and there was no way I had read it that recently. 

Turned out, though, that I did remember Martha Ballard by name and her story, but this book was not her story. I found the fictionalize version completely unbelievable.  I'm not an expert on that era by any stretch of the imagination, but I found the storyline completely implausible.  In many of these highly fictionalized accounts of historical events, I think there has been too much insertion of modern ideas that are more a reflection of our current thinking than of anything that could be consistent with the historical record.  I found this a huge distraction and I just could not get into the story at all~~ in large part because I knew that none of the story was in the diary and that we don’t have any other information about Ballard. The rest of the story was just too convenient, too much like how we wished things could have been for a spirited, intelligent woman.  I probably would have liked it more if she had changed the names and just said that she based it on historical records, including A Midwife's Tale.

Do not recommend.

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This is an absolutely terrible romance with irritating characters, including content that is just demeaning and offensive. I really did not find anything redeeming about it.  The good news is that it was a free download, so there is that.

Do not recommend.

I feel pretty terrible about this review. In a time when I think it is particularly important for us to reflect on the Holocaust, the violence of othering, and the horrors of ghettos and "camps" and determining human survival based on the official papers you carry, I am very sorry to report that this WWII book about all these topics is not to be recommended by me.  WWII historical fiction is usually a pretty easy sell for me, so this is almost certainly not why I didn't like it.

It started weird. This is because the story takes place in two time periods, while also telling a fictional vampire horror story that one of the characters wrote.  But you do not discover that is what is happening until really far into the book and it makes for a very confusing read.  And it felt almost like the author was deliberately trying to make it confusing.  Maybe she thought it would build up like a mystery and, to a large extent, I would call it a mystery, but it felt forced and unnecessary.  Yet, if you ignore the bizarre allegory vampire storyline distraction at the beginning, I found the book interesting enough at first and quite enjoyed the early character development that was mired in intrigue.

But even setting aside that problem, it just became more and more complicated as it jumped back and forth between narrators and time periods and between the actual story and the story-within-the-story.  I love a complex plot that makes me pay attention, but I kept thinking that this was a plot strategy meant to hide the ball.  And indeed, there were pieces of the story that were obviously being withheld--huge pieces of the story, like why one of the main characters has facial disfigurement from some type of trauma that most everyone in the story seems to know about and is alluded to over and over, but isn't spelled out for the reader until way past the point that I still cared.  It ended up just not being this big deal after all the hype to get to it. And again, I just felt like it was deliberately being done that way despite it not making any sense not to tell the reader.

Perhaps the most prominent reason for my not liking it was the gratuitous, graphic details of the violence that felt added for shock value.  Not that the Holocaust wasn't shocking and I don't disagree that some level of description of the details is appropriate and I don't want to discount that for survivors the horrors went on and on and on, each more horrific than the last.  There was just something about the way it was written that left me feeling like it was another game the author was playing with me as the reader.  I don't know how we learn about the time period without hearing about the details of the violence, but here it was done in a way that as I was reading I was aware that I was reading this book about this horrible thing that was designed to convey to me how horrible it was instead of letting the story unfold naturally.  In the context of the other unusual plotting choices, I just could not get into it.  So much so, that I had to take several breaks from it to read other things before coming back to finish it.

Not recommended.

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