I understand that this nearly 1,000 page book is revered as brilliant and that the author has received the Nobel Prize for Literature for another novel.  I know that many intelligent people think the book is amazing. I, however, feel like it was pretty much lost on me.  I found it a slog, pedantic, male-centric, and frankly boring.  Yes, some of the historical pieces were mildly interesting, but I have decided that I do not find 18th century Poland particularly enthralling.  Sometimes, it felt like the descriptions would never end and that the plot was a very long ways away from the words I was reading.  Other times, some of the narrative would pull me in, particularly the portions that compared the Jewish protagonist's exploration of other communities. But, those parts were short lived and almost as soon as I realized I was engaged, the moment would be gone and I would return to feeling that this book was just too heady for me.


Do not recommend.

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This is a fabulous murder mystery that I can't stop thinking about.  It is so well written, the characters are so richly developed, and the plot is delightfully complicated that I am seriously contemplating reading it a second time.  Set across time from 1961 to 1975 as they investigate an old murder and a new disappearance, the complexity of interpersonal dynamics and histories just pulled me in, all the time being filled with red herrings and twists, as the investigation proceeds. The standout character is the young woman detective no one takes seriously and the ending just reinforced how much I loved her.  I found the portrayal of sexism and elitism to be well portrayed, ever present, without having it be the sole focus of the story--reminding me of how even during my younger years it was so pervasive we often accepted it without noticing at all. Did I mention the ending of this book was so good? So often these complex stories have predictable, unrealistic, or just stupid endings that don't hold together, but this one was right on point.
Highly 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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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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​This is not what I was expecting.  Not only was it no what I as expecting, but even when I was well into the story, things would happen that I did not see coming.  Twice in a short period of time, I was out walking and audibly gasp at the unexpected turn of events. It wasn't that I didn't find the story plausible, because once it happened, it was obvious that it could have happened that way, but I was just so surprised and I cared so much about the story and he characters.

The "women" here are the women who joined the military as nurses and were deployed into combat hospitals during the Vietnam War. From deciding to enlist to deployment to coming home to the many twists and turns of life after that, I loved everything about this story.  The complicated relationships, the struggles, the trauma, the recovery, the heartaches, and the way she writes about the constant, crushing sexism of that era was all so tangible, so well conveyed.  

I didn't realize this was the same author who wrote The Nightingale, which is an absolute all time favorite of mine.  If you loved one of those, I think you would love the other, even though they are quite different in nature. The writing is impeccable.  I can't say that I am anything close to an expert on either WWII or the Vietnam War, but I know enough to have been impressed by the amount of research that had to have gone into the books.  I'm focused on my 50 bookish friends list, but I loved this book enough that I contemplated diverting from the list to read more of her books.

When the book was over, I left wishing there was more.  Not an epilogue -- I didn't think that was warranted, but more of the details of the story along the way because the storytelling was just so good. The depiction of the friendships that weave through the book were so vivid and impressive.  I loved the ending.  I love the middle parts.  I loved the twists and turns and the heartbreaks and most of all I loved the women in the story.
 
Highly recommend.  
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Written as a series of letters between a food reporter and a fan as they develop and deepen a long term friendship, this book has a tender and sweet feel to it and that comes through in the writing. Unfortunately, this came at the cost of anything that really pulled me into the story in more than a "this is what I am reading right now" kind of way, nothing felt dramatic or tense or irresistible.  It was tame.  Lovely, but bland.

Not recommended.

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I really wanted to like this book more than I did.  I loved the idea of this book and I actually liked the writing in this book, in terms of way the words flowed in the story.  I didn't love the story itself as much as I could have.  I loved that it was an intergenerational story about family, which is one of my favorite plots.  This one, though, didn't quite have the complexity that a good intergenerational novel has. Because that narrative has so many just really exceptional books that weave the generations together, I think the bar might be set unreasonably high.

In many aspects, this book reminded me of The Overstory, which everyone else seemed to love while I felt left out for feeling less than enthralled by it.  I actually liked this one significantly more than that one, which I found fairly pretentious.  But still, the "lessons" here were too obvious and I like to work harder for my enlightment.

All in all, it is a Not Not Recommended.

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The author's writing style here is not my favorite, both in terms of what sometimes feels like he is prattling on about things to fill up space, but also because he really likes a subtle cliffhanger.  The book is written in sections that are each 7 years apart, presumably based on the Waldorf or other similar theories about the important of 7-year developmental blocks divided in to 3 parts and an epilogue.  At the end of most (maybe all?) chapters, we are left in the middle of an event, the details of which are abandoned while we jump to the next time period.  I am sure this is meant to have some literary value and for sure all of the loose ends are tied up, but I found it irritating o have so many important facts just left hanging for so long.  It wasn't at all clear we were going to circle back to the dangling pieces and left me feeling hyper-aware of this as a literary tool.  I just found it distracting from the story.

However, given that I didn't love the prose itself and was irritated with the author's literary choices, by about part 3, I found myself very much immersed in the story on a number of levels.  I loved the complexity of the emotions and characters.  I really had to slog my way through the early years, which were a bit pedantic -- with a lot of emphasis on boys in all boy environments obsessed with their bodies and the ways they could use them.  At some point, though, the entire tenor of the book changed and I was quite surprised to find that as the character himself matured, the narrative did, too, until it had something meaningful to say.  

This story arc of a gay man's life in an homophobic world beginning in 1945 and continuing until 2015 was ultimately worthwhile, with insight about what growing up Queer was like and how that shapes a person's experiences and actions.

On a side note, I did not love how it dealt with a side issue of child sex abuse, which was told from the point of view of a woman who experienced abuse as a child and blamed herself in large part.  There was no counterpoint, leaving the narration of the story feeling victim blamey.  But, it was enough of a side issue and, given the context in which the story is told, it undoubtedly reflects how many women in her situation viewed the dynamics of what happened.

Recommend.

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I really do tend to love a good WWII historical fiction novel.  Classics like All The Light You Cannot see are solid choices, but my favorites include The Nightingale and Beneath The Scarlet Sky. I recently read and recommended The Winemaker's Wife, which I also quite liked.  This one, however, I just did not love.  There were significant pieces of the plot that I just did not find convincing.  It felt less historically accurate than many other books I have read about the era.  Not being an expert on really any historical era, let alone this era, I don't have anything to base this on other than it just didn't feel like it made as much sense or held together the way other novels have.  Here, it is the story of an American woman living in Paris and volunteering for the resistance.  At the same time, there is a parallel story of a Jewish father-daughter unit trying to make their way out of Nazi occupied Europe.  Their rescue and evacuation is complex and interesting.  There is some romance and some sweet moments.  But there was a lot of parts that seemed too light for the content. The characters just weren't developed in a way that made their actions make any sense to me. 

Not recommended. 
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