Book Review: PAPER HEARTS

Title: Paper Hearts

Author: Meg Wiviott

Publisher: Margaret K McElderry Books

Pages: 352

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

 

I’ve read numerous stories about the Holocaust and this one, based on a true story, was another grim reminder of that dark period. Here in India, the right-wing majoritarian government is following the Nazi rulebook. As a member of the minority, it is frightening to see the parallels.

I was drawn to the cover long before I read the synopsis. The curved line cutting through the P and H of the title, am embroidered seam on fabric, with the Star of David on the top corner.

This was my first experience of reading a novel set to verse. I was quite impressed with how the author countered the challenge of using few words and making them count.

The story is brought to us in the PoVs of Zlatka and Fania, two teenage girls at the Auschwitz concentration camp, in alternating chapters. Zlatka is the oldest of four children, who loses her family in the camps. The last time they are together is when they carry their worldly possessions to a grim future. We are reminded of the terror that the families face. The narrative in verse doesn’t give us details, but we know enough of this tumultuous and traumatic period in history to put them in.

Zlatka wants to show that she is stronger than they supposed a girl – a Jew – could be, should be. The transports, with their lack of toilets, filth and lack of privacy, and chunks of stale bread once a day are just the beginning of their troubles.  

Fania also loses her family in the camps. Before they are put on the transport, her father wonders How could such a society produce such masters (as Bach, Beethoven, Wagner and Goethe) and such monsters.

Fania’s parents think she looks Aryan, but it doesn’t save her from the worst.

 

Brief snatches of words gives us a glimpse of Jewish customs and rituals as on the night of the Passover. Past memories sneaking into the present.

The author picks the most frightening facts and distils them down. Images of Little children clung to coat hems in a place where fences too high to climb/ hummed with electricity.

Men made feral from war… I cringed,/ wondering,/ at a hollowness/ that made/ scrawny/ filthy/ sick/ girls look good enough to eat.

 

Within the narrative form, the author played around, using the form to show the Selection, the poor and frail on the left, the robust and strong on the right. The simple yet evocative titles section the scenes apart.

 

The very first verse gives us an idea of Zlatka’s changed reality as a Jew and her efforts to assert her identity while seeking not to draw attention. Eyes lowered/ not shamed/ footsteps steady/ not faster/ or slower/ than before.

We come to know of the steady isolation of Jews as the Nazis spread their tentacles. And we see the excesses of the camps, the shearing of hair, the tattooing of numbers, the tearing apart of families, through the eyes of the two girls.

It is a new order in which even criminals rank higher than Jews.

 

In the midst of it all, we see defiance, Laughter,/ not of the mad,/ but of the living. The girls become family to each other, offering consolation and comfort, facing the worst of Auschwitz. Guta, Giza, Bronia and others, all make a place for themselves in our hearts.

 

In a world in which the possession of a love letter is grounds for hanging, the girls know it would be suicidal to do what they did. And yet they barter precious bread to procure pencil and paper to make a small handmade paper heart for Fania’s birthday. The messages from the girls are a testament to their courage and a lesson to us on how life should be celebrated in the midst of our troubles.

Book Review: WUNDERLAND

Title: Wunderland
Author: Jennifer Cody Epstein
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Pages: 373
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

We meet Ava Fischer in 1989. She receives a carton that has upended her world. The carton arrives from Bremen in Germany and contains a package with the ashes of her dead mother, Ilse, and a bunch of unsent letters, addressed by Ilse to a woman called Renate Bauer.

Through the letters, Ava (and we) begin to piece the history of Ilse and Renate together.

Growing up as teenagers in 1933, Ilse von Fischer and her best friend, Renate Bauer, are inseparable. They share all their secrets about teenage crushes and love each other like sisters. It is a friendship that means everything to them.
 
But a terrible history is unfolding in the country, and life, as they know it, is going to be horribly transformed. Businesses owned by Jews are being boycotted and shut and the Nazi insistence on the perfect Aryan model is making itself felt.
 
Ilse joins the BDM, a group of German young women being trained in the ideology. She sinks deeper in her belief in the Reich. The friendship is severed totally from her side.

When Renate and her family are castigated and reviled as Jews, Renate learns to embrace her newfound identity, placing the two former best friends on opposite sides of a great divide.

Meanwhile, Ilse has her own secrets. There are many things Ava doesn’t know,. Why she was abandoned in an orphanage as a child, where Ilse was during those years, her father’s identity being the biggest mystery. Will the letters and the confessions in them finally bring the truth home to Ava?

 

The book is written in the 3^rd person present tense point of view of Renate and Ilse from 1933 onwards.
We have all read accounts of the Holocaust and World War II, but the unique viewpoint of this work of historical fiction made the horrors of the Holocaust vividly real. The two young girls, on the cusp of adolescence, find their friendship and their beliefs sorely tested, their lives torn apart on account of a cruel betrayal of one friend by the other.

The research that must have gone into the writing of this book is incredible. We see the birth of hate and war, and the geopolitical tumult that led to the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.

The chapters relating to the destruction of Jewish businesses were painful reading. They bring alive the mob mindset of the rioters, how they see themselves as patriots who are wreaking destruction in support of a greater cause.

The writing was beautiful. What were their final thoughts as they lay bleeding in the snow or mud?... Or had they realised by then that it was all nothing more than a vicious trick; a foolish fable concocted by a madman whose only legacy would be the rest of the world’s loathing and revulsion?in

Here's another:

Not just the camaraderie she felt within the crowd’s collective fury, but a thrill of shouting…at her mother’s generation… wide wall of silence and complicity as the world erupted in napalm, flame, and corruption.

 
Living in an India whose very Indianness and democratic values are in question, we have deadly parallels to the Nazi regime. We have a megalomaniac in power who is promising to restore the country to its past (read: mythological) glory, but is pushing us back in time. The regime is succeeding in its aim to polarise the country and demonise its minorities. Not unlike Hitler and what he did with the Jews.

In the characters of the Bauers and the von Fischers, I see how my own compatriots have been polarised, as if a line had been drawn separating the two.

Renate’s parents, a doctor and a professor, hate Hitler but Ilse’s parents believe in him, another similarity with the India of today. Ilse herself believes that being part of the BDM is her chance to be part of something bigger.

This was a beautiful novel, one that particularly resonated with me because of the times we live in. 

Book Review: THE BROKEN GIRLS

Title: The Broken Girls
Author: Simone St James
Publisher: Berkley
Pages: 336
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was a book that started slow and awkward. I almost gave it up. Thankfully, I didn't. 

I almost never give up on a book and my patience and determination to keep reading were rewarded with this slow burner that soon picked up pace. 

The Broken Girls turned out to be a thriller and murder mystery that went beyond its genre, growing to be an indictment of the Holocaust and its excesses, a paranormal ghost story, a tale of friendship spanning decades, a tale of justice denied and fought for.

Fiona Sheridan has not been able to get over the loss of her sister Deb, who was strangled and dumped at Idlewild Hall, an old, abandoned girl’s school which has been abandoned since 1979. Deb’s boyfriend, Tim Christopher, was tried and convicted of the crime, but that has not given Fiona closure. She is still haunted by the crime, unable to move on, even as Tim has spent 20 years in maximum security jail. She wonders if Tim killed Deb, or if someone else did.

Fiona gets herself an assignment, writing about the restoration of Idlewild. The new owners are Margaret Eden and her son, Anthony. Her efforts are supported by Jamie Creel, a cop and her boyfriend.

On a tour of the place, with Anthony, Fiona learns that another body has been discovered. The body of a school girl, Sonia Gallipeau, who was killed in 1950, and her body dumped in an old well.

Fiona, already grieving Deb, grieves also for Sonia, the 15-year-old orphan girl whose life had been brutally cut short. She becomes determined to find out who killed Sonia, while also seeking to find out who killed Deb.

But Jamie’s father, Garrett Creel, a former police chief, resents her attempt to revive the case. How far will he go to stymie her efforts. Will Fiona succeed? Will justice be served to Deb and Sonia?

After the Prologue set in November 1950, in which we learn that a young teenage girl is about to die, the story alternates between the 3^rd person past tense viewpoint of Fiona in November 2014, and to those of Katie Winthrop, Roberta, CeCe and Sonia Gallipeau in October 1950.

In time, we get to know the four girls, room-mates turned friends, quite closely. We learn of their individual histories, of how they came to be at Idlewild Hall, the boarding school of last resort, where parents stashed their embarrassments, their failures, and their recalcitrant girls. 

Each of them had a strong story which came out well. I was particularly touched by what Sonia had gone through, having lived at Ravensbrück prison as a young child.

Through the twin narratives of Fiona and the Idlewild girls, we are acquainted with Mary Hand, a ghost who haunts the school. A ghost who is brings to life a person’s worst fears. A ghost who terrifies you with your worst horrors. Mary was a strong presence who left her mark on the story.

Initially, I found the writing banal. The devices the employed were old and worn out. For instance, we get Fiona’s description when she looks into her car’s rearview mirror. We find Jamie talking at length, about something that Fiona already knows, but that, she says, she wants him to talk about because it’s more fun to get information from you. How bland is that!

But gradually, it seems as if the author gets more comfortable with the story, and you settle down for the ride. Simone does a great job of creating a mood of suspense and terror. It is in the descriptions and the action sequences that she truly excels.  There is something forbidding, brooding about the descriptions. The landscape of Vermont comes alive, in a way that helps one imagine it.

After the first few chapters, the writing became more intense. The fear that the characters felt, the emotions and feelings they went through became more real to us. I felt a deep sense of compassion for the four friends in 1950, with no family to love them.

I didn’t quite take to Fiona initially. Her dad was more vigorous and alive, compared to her. But gradually I began to like her. Her character underwent a positive change. From being somebody who wrote fluffy lifestyle pieces, she began to want to write a story on Idlewild. 

I also appreciated the fact that even as she grieved for her own sister, she also grieved for Sonia, for the fact that no one had mourned her loss. Fiona’s tendency to not just want to whiz by, but to want to stop and truly see, also appealed to me.

I liked the description of Malcolm: Malcolm Sheridan had never done small talk — he was the kind of man who looked you in the eye on first meeting and said, Do you enjoy what you do? Do you find it fulfilling?  If you had the courage to answer, he’d listen like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard.

Apart from these characters, I also found the four girls to be very strong and well drawn out. Jamie, on the other hand, I didn’t much care for, even though the author went on and on about his muscular arms. His character arc didn’t grow as well as Fiona’s had.

In contrast, even Lionel Charters, who plays a bit role, came out stronger.

The younger man-older woman pairing, 29 to 37, was bold. But the romance, in the initial chapters, was utterly lackluster. It was also a little unreal that Fiona felt absolutely no insecurity about the age gap. But then again, maybe it was because she had freethinking, hippie parents.

Once again this relationship also benefited from the improvement in the writing.

The book gently mocks old-time phrases, like being born on the wrong side of the blanket, as well as the girls' textbook, Latin Grammar for Girls. As Jamie says, “The good old days when apparently Latin was different if you were a girl.” And using the term ‘iron deficiency’ for having one’s period. 

The author makes fun of the outdated notions in a gentle but firm manner. It was not assumed that the housewives of the future needed to know much about science.

But there were some errors and some awkwardness that slipped past that should have been caught.

Early on, Fiona tells Jamie, “It pays to have a nosy journalist on your side,” and that’s funny. Fiona is far from nosy.

The name and surname, Charlotte Kankle, were repeated five times and Cindy Benshaw twice. Surely the author could have called her just Charlotte the second time onwards. On the other hand, we don’t get to know Roberta’s surname until 2014, as part of Fiona’s research. But these were minor errors in the larger scheme of things. 

The cover was beautiful. The intimidating image of Idlewild, as seen through a cracked window pane. 

The book was beautiful, and the women characters and their stories certainly deserve your attention.

(I received an ARC from First to Read).

Book Review: WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

Title: We Were The Lucky Ones
Author: Georgia Hunter
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 416

At first, I wondered about the appropriateness of titling a book set during the Holocaust We were the Lucky Ones.

But that is exactly that the Kurc family, resident in Radom, Poland, at the start of the war in March 1939, turned out to be. Despite suffering the worst excesses, this family emerged alive through the War, ready to make a fresh start in the post-war world.

Each chapter of this story is told from the third person present tense point of view of a different family member. 

It is in this manner that we meet Sol and Nechuma Kurc, a prosperous Jewish couple, and their children. Eldest daughter, Mila, is married to Selim; they have a two-year-old daughter, Felicia. Son Genek is married to Herta. Addy, still single, is working in Paris, Jakob is in love with Bella, and youngest daughter, Halina, is in a relationship with Adam, the family’s tenant.

When World War II breaks out, the men, Selim, Genek and Jakob, are conscripted to fight. Jakob asks Bella to join him in Lvov where they live, and she does so, nearly losing her life as she makes the perilous journey. Those left behind are assigned new jobs. 

Halina is sent to pluck beets at a beet farm and Mila to sew clothes at a garment factory, where she goes to work, with Felicia strapped to her chest. At the factory, the child plays under the table all day. Meanwhile, Sol and Nechuma work in a cafeteria. Nechuma smuggles home potato peels to season their meal.

And then there comes a day when the family is assigned to a new shabby home while their spacious five-bedroom apartment is usurped by Germans. The Kurcs may only take their clothes and valuables.

Meanwhile, in France, Addy is sent a summons for conscription. He secures a time-bound visa to travel to Brazil. But the ship that he is travelling in is refused entry into Brazil because of the political picture of the continent has altered in the months in the interim period. 

The ship docks at Casablanca, where he gets into a relationship with Eliska, a rich Jewish girl.

At the end of each chapter, we get the historical events that transpired then, the ones that led to the War and saw Jews being persecuted and subsequently exterminated in concentration camps. Each chapter shows us things getting worse.

Genek and Herta are taken away from their home in the middle of the night and transported by train over the next 42 days in horrific conditions to Siberia. There they are made to work felling logs, surviving on meagre rations and facing Siberia’s horrible winters. It is here that Herta becomes pregnant and gives birth to baby Jozef.

Meanwhile, Halina joins Adam, with great difficulty, just as Bella had once done. Around this time, Bella discovers that her sister, Anna, and her husband are killed. Living in Lvov is fraught with danger, and so Jakob, Bella and her cousin, Franka leave for Radom again. Adam is taken to a work camp. Halina gets him released, using her grandmother’s silver cutlery as a bribe.

Each member of the family lived through such a harrowing time, and for long years, it seemed that things only got worse. I kept looking at the timeline, longing for 1945, when the Allies would win and the War would be over.

Portions of it made for difficult reading. I couldn’t read beyond these parts, imagining the plight of these people.

During the course of Genek and Herta’s terrible journey to Siberia, we read the heartrending account of the mother who sat for days with a dead baby in her arms, and stopped eating when the baby was thrown out by the Soviet soldiers. Later, the soldiers threw her out of the train too. 

I was also upset by the part in which little Felicia, who has been hidden in a sack and told to act like a statue during a Nazi inspection of the factory is nearly discovered by them.

There is so much that members of this family went through at the concentration camps. The holes in the ground that served as toilets. The demeaning lack of privacy. The anxiety of not knowing whether one would survive from one minute to another.

In the midst of difficulties, things start looking up for Addy. He finally reaches Brazil and after seven months of doing odd jobs, gets his work permit and a job. He and Eliska grow apart as he misses his family and Eliska fails to understand his sorrow.

Jakob and Bella return to Radom. As the political situation alters, allies turn into foes and vice versa, worsening the plight of the Jews depending upon where they find themselves.

Genek, Herta and Jozef are released by the Soviets and taken by train to Kazakhstan.

Hitler allows some Jews to emigrate to America. Mila and Felicia are on the first train, on the first leg of their long journey. But the train is led to a wilderness where the passengers are told to dig their own graves.

Jakob and Bella get a job in a factory outside Radom, in German-occupied Poland.

As the political situation worsens, the most fragile of securities slips away. All the siblings make efforts to help each other. Of them, Halina is the feistiest of the lot.

But my heart went out to Mila and Felicia. Mila’s circumstances were truly heartrending as she took the biggest risks to safeguard herself and her child. And Felicia herself, seeing such horrors at her age.

As their bodies waste away for lack of food, the author tells us of Bella, Her cheekbones grew more pronounced, and under her shirt, her ribs jutted from beneath her skin like a keyboard made up of only sharps and flats.

It was only at the end of the book that I became aware that it was a true story and that the author is the granddaughter of Addy. Truly a beautiful and touching recountal.

The writing was good, and the descriptions more than adequate. The author could so easily have resorted to using abusive language against the hateful Nazis. But she keeps to the facts, and gives us this fictionalized retelling of historically true events.

I was glad to read this one through to the end.

While we remember the millions that died in the Holocaust, we can rejoice with this family that lived to give thanks to God for seeing them through the worst.

(I got a free ARC from FirstToRead).

Book Review: YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE

Title: You are my sunshine
Author: Roberta Kagan
Publisher: Self published
Pages: 403

You are my Sunshine, Book II in the All My Love, Detrick series, takes off from the story of Helga, and the little girl, named Katja, that she gave birth to. But baby Katja is only a minor character in this story. She only serves as a peg upon which Roberta Kagan has hung this book.

The protagonists of this book are Manfred Blau, a German Nazi, and Zofia Weiss, a Polish Jew, whose lives intersect for a while.

The plot follows the life of Manfred Blau, a weak and puny German boy with low self-esteem who joins the Nazi party in an effort to improve his standing and his position. The move helps and Manfred finds himself rising in the estimation of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda.

His renewed confidence gives him the courage to woo and win Christa Henkener, a beautiful and rich classmate of his from school, who he would otherwise never have been able to befriend. Deeply in love, Manfred and Christa marry, even as he begins to move up in the Nazi hierarchy.

Meanwhile, Christa’s father, surgeon Dr Thomas Henkener, hates the Nazis and goes out of his way to help his Jewish doctor colleagues. He is caught and named a traitor. As punishment, Manfred is ordered to shoot his father-in-law. 

But the Nazi Party does not forgive easily. Manfred and his family, including baby Katja who they have adopted, move to Treblinka where Manfred is put in charge of the concentration camp there.

There Manfred discovers the cruel side of his personality as he revels in killing and sadistically beating and torturing the Jews under his control. Treblinka is also where he meets the other protagonist of this work, Zofia Weiss, who has had a baby girl, Eidel, out of wedlock.

Christa never recovers from the trauma of seeing her husband shoot her father, and she takes to her bed. Manfred brings Zofia into his home as a house-servant. There she is subject to sexual slavery, apart from looking after the household needs and little Katja.

A rebellion in the camp causes the Nazis to shut down Treblinka. Christa pleads for Zofia’s life and she is allowed to run for her life. In the woods, Zofia meets Isaac and Shlomie, and so begins a tender love story between Zofia and Isaac. It is also a time when they must avoid being captured by the Germans.

The book brings out the sense of loss, as the survivors lose loved ones, their homes and belongings. Many lose their faith, their minds. There seems to be nothing to live for.

Kagan expresses well the desolation that comes upon the Jews as they are forced into overcrowded trains, with only standing space, trains choked with the stench of vomit, urine and feces, and also of death. For it is not until the train reaches the concentration camp that they will be allowed off the train.

This book sees an improvement on the chapter front – only 89, but the tendency to have ultra-small 200-word chapters and the errors in proofreading and spelling persist. Sentences in which characters are thinking also show some seriously awkward construction. This book, like the first in the series, needed a good editor to bring out the best in it.

There is a continuity issue too. The Prologue informs us that Katja was born in 1939, but in 1947, she is still shown to be a small child.

The cover image, presumably baby Katja, is misleading; the book isn't about the child at all.

The ending was the most annoying, and felt like a real cheap trick to get the reader enthused about reading the third book in the series.

Earlier on, we read about Isaac being captured by four German soldiers just before the war ends. Zofia never finds him again.

However, just as she and Katja are set to board the ship Exodus, setting out on its maiden trip to the nation of Israel, someone calls out to Zofia by name.

It’s obviously someone significant, seeing who “her (Zofia’s) breath caught and her lungs tightened,” but we receive no hints as to the identity of this mysterious person. Kagan gyps us by not telling us who the person is, not even whether that person is a male or a female, forget about whether it was Isaac.

I was certainly hoping Zofia would bump into him again (I can’t help it. I have a thing for happy endings.)

We will have to read Part III of the series, The Promised Land, to figure that out.

                             

Book Review: ALL MY LOVE, DETRICK

Title: All my love, Detrick
Author: Roberta Kagan
Publisher: Self-published
Pages: 355









All My Love, Detrick by Roberta Kagan is a Holocaust novel of fiction that brings us face to face with the brutal reality of the darkest period in history, and the harrowing and horrific treatment meted out to Jews by one cruel and insanely ambitious man.

Detrick Haswell, a 7-year-old German Christian boy, forges an unlikely friendship with Jacob Abdenstern, the Jewish owner of a bicycle repair shop. The grown man is kind and compassionate and he becomes a solid father figure in the young lad’s life.

When Detrick grows older, in a Germany that has begun flirting with the Nazis, he shuns their doctrines, and clings to his friendship with Jacob, despite the risk it entails. When he falls in love with Jacob’s daughter, Leah, he becomes even more willing to undertake desperate measures to save them.

Meanwhile, Detrick’s best friend, Konrad Klausen, a puny youth who always depended on Detrick’s friendship and protection, joins the SS. Heady with the power that the SS’ black uniform gives him, he proceeds to give vent to his latent urge for domination.

Despite hating the Nazis and all they stand for, Detrick joins the SS, hoping the black uniform will offer him the cover he needs to protect the Abdensterns. But the attempt fails and Leah and her father are whisked off to a concentration camp.

While the love story of Detrick and Leah is the centre point of the novel, we also receive insights into the histories of some of the other Jews.

Jacob’s son, Karl, becomes angry at the growing anti-Semitism and longs for Palestine, a nation in which Jews can live without fear. When he is sent to the concentration camp at Treblinka, he befriends a group of people with similar yearnings and joins in their struggle, ultimately dying in the camp. His story forms a significant subplot of the novel.

In another subplot, the Silver family, their daughter Dorothy is Leah’s best friend, move to America to escape the persecution. I found this plot insignificant in the larger context of the story, beyond showing the plight of those Jews that relocated to distant lands to escape the persecution.

Dorothy’s story reminded me of Theodore Dreiser’s flawed heroines, girls from upright families, raised well, who lose their way on account of circumstances.

We also come to know of the Lebensborn Institute, a place that welcomes unmarried Aryan mothers-to-be, so long as they have had trysts with pureblood Aryans, through the story of Helga, Detrick’s sister. A torrid affair, followed by a single night of passion, with an SS officer, Eric, leads to a pregnancy. But Eric is married, and so Helga finds herself directed to the Lebensborn, where she gives birth to a child, named Katja. This subplot is taken forward in Book II of the series, You Are My Sunshine.

Kagan also leads us down another meaningless subplot about Eric and his married life. I call it meaningless because it does not prove its relevance either in this book or the next. Perhaps it will justify itself in Book III.

Beginning in Berlin in 1923 in the Prologue, the novel takes off ten years later in the city as it was in 1933, when widespread dissatisfaction had caused people to blame the Jews for the misery that Germany suffered following its defeat in World War I. It was also the time when Adolf Hitler is preparing to rouse Germany with rhetoric about Aryan supremacy and the Jewish “menace”.

The story beats time to the timelines of history, reflecting the tremendous amount of research that Kagan has put into this work. Interspersed with the life stories of the principal characters are italicized tidbits about Hitler’s appointment as the chancellor of Germany and later as the Fuehrer; the passing of the Nuremberg Race Laws, forbidding interaction of any kind with Jews; Kristalnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when Nazis burned down a synagogue and attacked Jewish people and destroyed property in a mad rampage.

There are a lot of descriptions of the sexual act in the book, between Detrick and Leah, between Helga and Eric, and between Dorothy and Tony, her married lover. But they are all tastefully done, and do not cause you to cringe.  

Kagan’s writing is good, but there are a large number of proofreading errors and quite a few spelling mistakes that mar the effect that the book has on you.

Despite the author’s efforts, I didn’t find myself rooting for any of the characters. Neither Detrick nor Leah held my attention. One reason for that might have been the stories of the minor characters that competed for my attention.

I also found the sheer number of chapters, at 159, annoying and too painful to endure. I wish Kagan had seen fit to combine some of the chapters together. Many of the chapters are less than a page, too small to be called a chapter.

There are 27 chapters that are about 300 words long. Another 11 chapters include only about 120 words. Three others hold about 250 words, while six chapters include 100 words and yet another consists of 150 words.

Two chapters have about 60 words while three consist of less than 100.

Chapter 44 is exactly 30 words long and Chapter 155 has 37 words.

Also, the fact that Kagan has taken on such a large canvas and sought to do justice to so many characters, including minor ones, gives this work a slightly disjointed feel. You feel for each character while you are in the moment with them, but you don’t recall them for too long after that.

All in all, I found the book interesting, but only just so.


(Watch out for my review of Book II, You are my Sunshine tomorrow.)