This has got to be one of the very worst books I've ever read. The writing is ham-handed in the extreme.
There is absolutely no character development, and absolutely no ambiguity: essentially every character is either all-good or all-evil, and the only exceptions are the ones that are unexpectedly good at exactly the moment required to rescue one or the other of the two heroines.
The author name-drops Parisian places ceaselessly (think of Hemingway at his worst), and yet the reader gets absolutely no sense of locale. (For a lesson in how to treat locale, try "Snow Falling on Cedars" by David Guterson.)
The dialogue is clunky and unrealistic. This is especially true of the 11-year-old daughter who speaks like a sage counselor, but the dialogue is awkward throughout.
After having read just the first few pages, I felt as though I could write the entire remainder of the novel--the foreshadowing was that clumsy, and the plot "twists" that predictable. There was truly only one plot surprise: the author foreshadowed that the family's wealth would turn out to have been earned by selling furnishings acquired from deported Jews, but then failed to follow up. I guess she just considered the antique-dealing past a throw-away detail of no importance.
The reliance on trite, overused phrases was agonizing: one or another character "squared her shoulders" more than once, an old man was "grizzled," that sort of thing.
The novel is as pedantic as you can imagine. The author bludgeons you show more with some variation on "never forget" so relentlessly that you honestly hope you can. If you had a nickel for every time she reminded you that it was French, not German, police that rounded up Jews for deportation and annihilation at Auschwitz (not to mention the horrifying conditions in the deportation camps), then it would certainly pay for the book--but save the money for something of higher quality, such as the toll on the New Jersey Turnpike.
This author simply does not know how to write. Aside from the horrifying history that it describes and the occasional four-letter-word, the writing is at the level of not-very-sophisticated juvenile literature. If you want a better written juvenile-lit depiction of Nazi horrors based on historical events, try "Escape from Warsaw" by Ian Serraillier or even "Snow Treasure" by Marie McSwigan.
Avoid this book. It is that terrible. show less
There is absolutely no character development, and absolutely no ambiguity: essentially every character is either all-good or all-evil, and the only exceptions are the ones that are unexpectedly good at exactly the moment required to rescue one or the other of the two heroines.
The author name-drops Parisian places ceaselessly (think of Hemingway at his worst), and yet the reader gets absolutely no sense of locale. (For a lesson in how to treat locale, try "Snow Falling on Cedars" by David Guterson.)
The dialogue is clunky and unrealistic. This is especially true of the 11-year-old daughter who speaks like a sage counselor, but the dialogue is awkward throughout.
After having read just the first few pages, I felt as though I could write the entire remainder of the novel--the foreshadowing was that clumsy, and the plot "twists" that predictable. There was truly only one plot surprise: the author foreshadowed that the family's wealth would turn out to have been earned by selling furnishings acquired from deported Jews, but then failed to follow up. I guess she just considered the antique-dealing past a throw-away detail of no importance.
The reliance on trite, overused phrases was agonizing: one or another character "squared her shoulders" more than once, an old man was "grizzled," that sort of thing.
The novel is as pedantic as you can imagine. The author bludgeons you show more with some variation on "never forget" so relentlessly that you honestly hope you can. If you had a nickel for every time she reminded you that it was French, not German, police that rounded up Jews for deportation and annihilation at Auschwitz (not to mention the horrifying conditions in the deportation camps), then it would certainly pay for the book--but save the money for something of higher quality, such as the toll on the New Jersey Turnpike.
This author simply does not know how to write. Aside from the horrifying history that it describes and the occasional four-letter-word, the writing is at the level of not-very-sophisticated juvenile literature. If you want a better written juvenile-lit depiction of Nazi horrors based on historical events, try "Escape from Warsaw" by Ian Serraillier or even "Snow Treasure" by Marie McSwigan.
Avoid this book. It is that terrible. show less