Eliza Graham

Two granddaughters are grieving for Rozenn Guillou Caradec, their dearly loved grandmother but only one granddaughter has inherited the home in Cornwall. Morane (Morie) wants to be happy for her sister Gwen but can't escape the twinges of jealousy as she remembers that her grandmother did seem almost desperate to communicate something to her during that last visit but simply could not. Was Morane's grandmother trying to teach her one more lesson in leaving her an old silver compass?

A show more mesmerizing account of a grandmother's past that is beautifully interwoven with the present as Morane discovers remnants of a letter hinting that there are answers simply waiting to be revealed. I felt my heart beating faster in wonder as it seemed that the answers were in St. Martin, France but how could Morane travel at a critical time for her business? I was totally absorbed with each step and with each decision of Morane's wanting to read as quickly as possible ever hopeful for the grandmother's past to be understood and yet reading carefully mindful that I was invested in the ease of her granddaughters' grieving hearts.

I found this expression of grief very meaningful as it captures so many heartfelt feelings that are hard to admit and share with others. “Everything I thought I wanted most was gone and I didn’t yet know how to replace it, to fill my life up again.”

The transition between the past of WWII and present-day is so skillfully written there are no knots in the threads of the storytelling. It is one of the most beautiful compositions portraying the intricacies of daily life in WWII while presenting a story transitioning seamlessly between past and present. Historical fiction this flawless helps us as readers understand the choices made were difficult as each choice made could change the possibilities of survival, choices made by family members could be different dependent on their role (parent/child/sibling) or relationship (parent/child, parent/parent, sibling/sibling, doctor/patient, friends), and that each person can experience the same event but have different remembrances and different ways of coping to move beyond the traumatic experiences.

My sincere thanks to Eliza Graham and Lake Union Publishing (Amazon US) for my complimentary digital copy of this title, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.

#YouLetMeGo #NetGalley show less

Complicated Story. This tale is one of those stories where the front half and back half are wildly divergent, and thus one's feelings of the overall tale may become more complex and nuanced - even as this book gets ever more preachy towards the end, even though it too started out more nuanced.

The front half of the book, spending roughly 30% of the front of the book establishing the various characters and their relationships, as well as the esteemed luxury liner they all find themselves on show more in the early periods of WWII - before December 1941. The next 20% or so is then spent in disaster/ survival mode, showing what happens with these characters as the worst happens and they are now in a desperate fight for survival. Indeed, this section even feels very reminiscent of the tales of the Titanic survivors, though I suppose those are only the most famous of the unknowable number of people over the course of human history to survive a ship sinking in the northern Atlantic ocean. Through these two sections in particular, we get a very good degree of nuance and showing, as The Imitation Game said it best "sometimes it is those no one imagines anything of that do the things that no one can imagine".

The back half of the tale begins to focus more and more on the aftermath of the sinking - and of British efforts to get America involved. This is where, as an American who has studied the relevant histories in some depth and who had direct family involvement in the era... the tale gets a LOT more complicated, personally. The writing is still great, and the tale itself flows very well. But my own thoughts and reactions to the tale became much more complicated.

At the time of the setting of this tale, one of my grandfathers had already enlisted in the US Army, knowing a war was on the horizon. It would be two more years, as the US military built up to the event now known as D-Day, before my other grandfather would come into the Army. While I never knew this second grandfather - he died weeks after my birth - I learned quite well his legacy in my own life, from the stories of my grandmother (his ex-wife) and my dad (who has made his point in life to largely do the opposite of what his own father did). The first grandfather, I shared the last 20 years of his life with the first 20 years of mine, and knew him as little more than a somewhat stereotypical southern US farmer grandfather. By the time I came around - and apparently even when my mom was growing up - he *NEVER* spoke of his time in WWII. I learned much when I got both of their service records about a decade ago now, and this is where my more complicated feelings about this book come to bear.

The first grandfather clearly believed similarly to our characters here in the back half of the tale, that Hitler *must* be stopped and America *must* join the fight. no matter the reason or cost. (Thinking of this now, it sounds eerily similar to statements some make about another ongoing European war in 2023...) Both of my grandfathers were at the Battle of the Bulge, and this first grandfather got a Silver Star and a Purple Heart because when he was ordered to clear a building on a particular corner in a tiny hamlet of a town, the Germans in that building came out in body bags, and he came out with an injury severe enough to send him to the field hospital. That was 38 years to the day before my birth, when his oldest son was something like 18 months old and my mother - his next to youngest child - was far off. He would die 58 years and a few weeks after that day, apparently the most decorated WWII veteran in his home County at the time of his death.

But that other grandfather. He was at the Bulge, but he was AAA infantry - and at that point, AAA infantry was being used for little more than cannon fodder for German tanks, sometimes literally being told to make do with broomsticks painted black to look like rifles. He was in the Division that liberated the first concentration camps on the American side of the war, though I have no record of where he individually was at that time. From hearing the second and third hand stories over the years, these experiences changed him - and little for the better. Nothing excuses what he became... but it was these very experiences, this very change that he had resisted for so long... what would have changed in *my own life* had that grandfather never been there, had the US never been in the war at all?

So getting back to the book, when the back half here is spent trying to manipulate the press into manipulating America into a war, when it is a tale of working to manipulate the press to make certain domestically popular positions as unpopular as they are in other nations - particularly nations America spent literally two *other* wars breaking away from... it becomes a much more complicated tale, both in the setting at the time and in the current environment where press manipulation is all too rampant - and equally, inaccurate cries of press manipulation (itself a press manipulation) are also all too rampant. Reading it with my own history of the war then and my own thoughts on the war now, the tale becomes much more complicated in this back half.

And yet, in the end, it really is a great tale, solidly told, and sometimes... sometimes we need those complicated stories that roil our hearts, without destroying them. Sometimes we need those complicated stories that make us think, both of our histories and of our current realities. Sometimes we need a tale that while escapism on its face, isn't quite the escapism we were expecting and instead confronts us with these Big Complicated Ideas.

If you're looking for a more "pure escapism" "Summer Read"... maybe this isn't that. And maybe you should read it anyway.

Very much recommended. show less

All the world's a stage.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic copy of this book for review through Library Thing's Member Giveaways program.)

Germany, December 1938. Only weeks after Kristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass," an orgy of organized violence against Jews in Germany and Austria), eleven-year-old Benjamin Goldman boards a Kindertransport train for England. Carrying just his school satchel and his cherished leather football, Benny is traveling light; with his father long show more since imprisoned by the Nazis, and a mother who lay dying of diphtheria, Benny has no one to see him off, and is eager to put his life in Germany behind him.

Once in England, Benny is "adopted" by Lord Sidney Dorner and his young wife Harriet. The wealthy couple pledged to sponsor twenty Jewish refugees; the best and brightest six boys are to stay at their Fairfleet estate, where they'll receive a top-notch education from university professor Dr. Dawes. For the next six and a half years, Benny tries his best to assimilate into his new, adopted country. Having always felt an outsider, he's determined to shed his German roots and become a "proper" Englishman. From day one at Fairfleet, Benny struggles to speak in English rather than German, even outside of the classroom. He excels in his studies and forms tentative friendships with his dorm mates.

And he falls in love with Harriet, his benefactor's wife. An aviatrix who flies auxiliary air transport for the Allies, Harriet is as beautiful as she is charming and enigmatic. Happiest when piloting her beloved Spitfire planes, Harriet is rarely present during Benny's formative years. Yet he finds himself pulled to her almost as strongly as she's drawn to her prized Fairfleet.

But even as he builds a life for himself in England - graduating from Fairfleet to national service, university, and eventually a storied career in journalism - Benny Gault (as he's now known) feels an outsider, weighed down by a devastating and shocking secret he's been carrying since his last days in Germany.

Summer, 1981. When Clarissa's husband suddenly leaves her for another woman, she and her two children - twelve-year-old Rose and brother Andrew - seek refuge with Clarissa's socialite mum. The trio moves back to Clarissa's childhood home: Fairfleet.

Plagued by the same mental illness that claimed her father James, Clarissa's mental state begins to devolve - that is, until Harriet convinces her daughter to see a psychiatrist. While on lithium, her mood stabilizes; and, though the medication makes her feel slow and sluggish, and not at all herself, Clarissa promises her mother that she'll stay the course - for her family's sake. Life begins to fall into a calm, steady rhythm. And then Harriet is unexpectedly struck down by a ruptured appendix (of all things!).

In the wake of their loss, a wanderer named Cathal Pearse enters the picture. Slowly but surely he worms his way into the Madisons' lives: starting with odd jobs, he soon becomes a full-time employee, eventually convincing Clarissa to school the children at Fairfleet under his tutelage. He seduces the vulnerable Clarissa, drugs her with sleeping pills, and withholds her medication. Longtime housekeeper Alice "Smithy" Smith - who might love the old bricks and mortar of Fairfleet as much as Harriet - remains suspicious of Cathal's intentions, and is eventually driven from the home for her trouble.

In six short months, Cathal has manipulated the family so that they're completely under his control; isolated and dependent. Tensions come to a head one snowy winter night and, thirty years later, Rose still shoulders the guilt for her role in the events that led to her mother's death.

Present day. When hospice nurse Rosamond Hunter is offered a job at Fairfleet, her boyfriend and brother beg her not to take it. What good can come of revisiting the traumatic events that unfolded at the Fairfleet estate more than thirty years ago? But Rosamond - known as Rose all those years ago - is desperate to prove to Andrew that their mother really did love them, that in her more lucid moments she tried her best to protect them from the monster known as Cathal. Rosamond needs to find a letter: the letter that Clarissa wrote to her lawyer. The letter that was never posted, but instead stashed in the drawer of an old bureau in the basement. The one that will prove Clarissa's redemption.

When she takes the job, neither Rosamond nor Benny is aware of the ties binding them: to Fairfleet, to Harriet, and ultimately to one another. As Benny draws closer to the end, his desire for forgiveness and understanding overwhelm the shame that's engulfed him for the past seventy years - and both their secrets come rushing to the surface.

I expected The One I Was to be "just" another piece of historical Holocaust fiction, maybe with a little thread of mystery woven in. (Scare quotes because such novels are anything but ordinary; there's nothing "just" about them. And yet another qualifier escapes me.) I couldn't have been more wrong. The One I Was is like no other Holocaust fiction I've ever read: equal parts mystery, suspense, romance, coming of age, and - yes - historical fiction, The One I Was is a unique animal. Captivating, well-written (and professionally edited! I don't always expect this of ebooks!), and full of tension, I can't say enough good things about it. On more than one night I stayed up entirely too late, repeating the mantra "just one more chapter!" before bedtime.

While all the characters are convincingly rendered and multidimensional, I especially loved Harriet. Through her wartime activities, we get a sense of the opportunities that opened up to women during World War II - and the crippling sense of disappointment, unfairness, and (yes) stifling captivity when some of them were later forced to return to the domestic sphere. And yet she's not without her flaws: her would-be affair with 17-year-old Benny is problematic at best, since she and Lord Dorner are his guardians - for a third of his short life, in fact - even as Harriet was rarely present at Fairfleet to provide the boys with comfort or guidance.

Two fractured people, Benny and Rose are kindred spirits - one trapped by a decades-old lie, the other living a life stunted by the things done to her in childhood. Graham expertly weaves their narratives together, providing a poignant look at the dynamics of interpersonal violence, as well as the confusion and chaos of wartime and the absurdity of stereotypes and prejudice. Five stars.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2014/06/04/the-one-i-was-by-eliza-graham/ show less

The scale of this book is immense - over eighty years of European history covered, and several characters followed as their lives are blown off course by war. I found it oddly contradictory: I like to read informative fiction, and here was a whole array of historical events - from the effects of the Versailles Treaty through Nazi Germany and a gulag or two - and yet I didn't feel as if I learned much; instead it felt as though I needed to go away and research the events first so I could show more understand what was going on. Also, so much of the plot rests on emotional connections between the characters, and yet I didn't feel any such connection with them myself, the daytime-TV style final chapters leaving me resolutely dry-eyed. And though the book moves quickly, in order to fit everything in, it doesn't bring with it the rollercoaster feeling you get from a fast moving story, instead it feels as if events are being sketched too quickly for you ever to get a grip on them.

All the way through we are whisked backwards and forwards in time and told little snippets of the story. This can be an effective way of storytelling, but in this case it left me disorientated as each chapter raised more questions than it answered, and sent off little shoots which might have resulted in interesting plot developments, but which were often not mentioned again. Throughout, I found myself thinking less would have been more, in the sense that concentrating on just one of the plot elements (eg Gregor's experiences in Poland and the Soviet Union) would have made a great story on their own. At one point, four of the characters find themselves in a tense standoff overnight in a house, complex connections between them having established in previous chapters, and I wondered if this was what the book had been leading up to - maybe the rest of the story would be taken up with the events of that night, the sort of thing you could run as a stage play in front of a live audience. I wasn't unhappy at the prospect, but I was wrong - whilst this scene might be the focal point of the novel, it is over quite quickly as with most other scenes, and the characters go haring off into their futures at breakneck pace.

There were some nicely described passages (in particular I found myself re-reading the bit where Gregor considers a future in London several times for reasons that are unclear), and to its credit it covers the part of Austria that became part of Italy after World War I. Watching the tennis recently I heard the commentator say of a player: 'he comes from the German speaking part of Italy' and was sure he must have made a mistake. But he was right - it's covered right here. But all in all, it was a book I was relieved to get to the end of; like being dragged through a series of muddy puddles with your foot tangled in a stirrup, you're glad when the horse finally stops. show less