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Are We Downhearted?: Dear Mrs. Bird

31 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: Dear Mrs. Bird, by AJ Pearce
Scribner, 2018. 281 pp. $26

Emmeline Lake has always wanted to be a journalist, and since it’s 1940, and London is being bombed almost nightly, how better to do her bit than as an intrepid reporter? She already volunteers for the Auxiliary Fire Service, answering telephone calls during Luftwaffe raids. But though she enjoys the work and the camaraderie, Emmy believes she has more to her and more to give. So when she sees an ad from what she thinks is the London Evening Chronicle for an assistant, she applies right away. Her friend Marigold, known as Bunty — don’t ask why; this is England — encourages her to celebrate the start of a sparkling career in reportage. Emmy, the optimistic, hopeful sort, eats it up, and pretty soon, everybody who knows her is congratulating her on her big break into journalism.

Aldwych Underground station used as an air-raid shelter, 1940 (courtesy Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

It never occurs to Emmy that, as a junior assistant, she’s more likely to find her typing skills an asset than creative get-up-and-go. Nor does the way she practically walks into the job for the asking set off any alarm bells. Rather, she makes the unhappy discovery that she’s on a different floor from the Evening Chronicle, and it might as well be the moon. Emmy has gotten herself a job as typist to the redoubtable Mrs. Henrietta Bird, the Dear Abby of Woman’s Friend magazine, though a more apt description might be Dear Queen of Hearts. Mrs. Bird doesn’t exactly say, “Off with her head!” But she does shout, and she refuses to answer, or even read, any letter that has the least bit of Unpleasantness in it. The few replies she writes suggest that her empathy, if she ever had any, was jellied in aspic sometime around 1911. There may be a war on, and women are asked to bear many burdens of which men know nothing, all while remaining completely unflappable, cheerful, and physically attractive. But Mrs. Bird knows nothing of this and would rather not hear about it.

Emmy cares, however, and knows how to respond, or thinks she does. And since her boss is often out, that leaves the chance open for mischief, or, as Emmy sees it, offering help to those in need. I’ll leave you to guess what happens.

Pearce captures a certain spirit of the time, an honest, cheery, keep-your-chin-up mood for which beleaguered Londoners enduring the Blitz became famous. Lissa Evans, for one, has written about the other side of that spectrum, those who pretended selflessness or patriotism but were really on the take. Yet there’s no doubt that young women like Emmy existed, and if part of Dear Mrs. Bird seems fanciful, it’s also irresistibly charming:

Today, London was operating under a low and dreary grey sky, the sort that looked like a giant boy had flung off his school jumper and accidentally covered up the West End. Braving the cold, I was wearing a smart blue single-breasted serge suit, my very best shoes, and a little black tilt hat that I had borrowed from Bunty. I hoped I might look both businesslike and alert. The sort of person who could sniff out a scoop and get the measure of it in a moment. The sort of person who is not feeling as if her heart might positively explode.

Humor’s the key to this novel, and I love Pearce’s touch. For instance, of the drinks cabinet in Emmy and Bunty’s flat, the women have decided that if the Germans invaded and broke in, “we would push it down the stairs at them. The full extent of the British Empire was featured in a rather confident orange and we thought that would make them quite wonderfully cross.”

But these people also know pain and hardship as their city’s being blown to bits. Dear Mrs. Bird contains touching moments when war intrudes, and it’s impossible — undesirable — to keep a stiff upper lip. In such a strained atmosphere, estrangements are sometimes inevitable, and Pearce never lets her heroine sail through life. With the bombs falling, that would be ridiculous. The ending does seem a bit contrived, but it’s also funny, and to object would be churlish. Dear Mrs. Bird is a delightful book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Human Flaws Exposed: Dazzle Patterns

12 Monday Nov 2018

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Review: Dazzle Patterns, by Allison Watt
Freehand, 2018. 339 pp. $22

Clare Holmes works in a glassworks in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, a port city that buzzes with wartime traffic. Living in the big town instead of on her parents’ farm has provoked a constant, simmering conflict with Clare’s controlling mother, Ada. But Clare has plans that Ada would never dream of. The young woman is saving up for her passage to France so that she can become a Red Cross nurse and be near her soldier fiancé, Leo.

However, when a ship blows up in the harbor, the blast destroys the glassworks and a swath of town, leaving many dead. The consequences for Clare are severe and cascading. Not only does she lose an eye, which means Ada grabs her and brings her home; Clare worries that Leo won’t want her anymore; and, worse, the post-traumatic stresses sap her desire to live. Her friends hold out hope that she’ll be able to return to the glassworks, but her job there involved checking the product for flaws, and the boss isn’t the only one who doubts she can manage that with only one eye. It’s a nice twist, the flaw-checker who feels — and is — damaged herself. And she becomes so aware of her imperfection that she can hardly get out of bed, let alone function.

But Clare is nothing if not independent-minded, and Watt has put her protagonist’s inner life on vivid display. Overcoming her disability literally means Clare has to develop another way to see the world in perspective; and when you read that she takes up drawing, the metaphor gains breadth. But her adaptation of course involves how she sees herself, and this is my favorite aspect of Dazzle Patterns. Where once Clare defined the future as being Leo’s wife, or, more immediately, staying out of Ada’s clutches and becoming a nurse, she now takes a larger view. It’s as if Clare’s loss and necessary compensation for it have let her grow in unforeseeable ways, to extend the metaphor even further.

Watt’s at her best when the narrative stays in Halifax. She portrays the home front and all its fears and prejudices with a sure hand, as well as the boarding house Clare lives in, the glassworks, and the horrific aftermath of the explosion. Here’s the destruction recounted through the eyes of Fred, a glassblower whom Clare later befriends:

Walking back to his rooming house Fred saw houses fallen in upon themselves, charred like abandoned bonfires, or burnt completely away, only the chimneys flooded with black puddles of ash and snow. Standing houses stared blank-eyed, all their windows gone. Telephone poles tilted. On the street, a breadbox, a school bag, a woman’s evening shoe, black patent with a pointed toe and a velvet bow. At the corner of Agricola and West Street, Fred brushed the snow off and righted an empty baby carriage.

But I think Fred’s less successful than Clare as a character. Watt makes him a prewar German immigrant, which allows her to evoke the jingoistic suspicion of an “enemy alien” who is actually a naturalized Canadian. I like the theme and how Watt plays it, but Fred’s a bit too good to be true, as if the chief victim of the narrative must be a paragon.

Leo’s more believable as a person, but what happens to him, less so. He’s a sapper, assisting the engineer officer who tunnels under German lines. Watt’s depiction of that rings true. But the narrative fudges on what the Western Front looks and feels like, and other details are simply inaccurate. Most critically—and I don’t want to reveal too much–Watt fails to consider what a civilian’s possession of a firearm in a war zone can mean, as in getting the entire village put up against a wall. Moreover, that entire setup seems designed to alter Leo in convenient ways, whereas leaving him as he was, though messier, would add depth and conflict.

Finally, I hope that what I read is an uncorrected proof — although it doesn’t say so — and that a proofreader will catch mistakes like the constant misspelling of Fred’s German name, and the typographical and grammatical errors that crop up.

Still, I enjoyed Dazzle Patterns. The story is compelling, Watt tells it with brio, and has provided a heroine worthy of your time and attention.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

More Subversion, Please: Wolf Hollow

03 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: Wolf Hollow, by Lauren Wolk
Dutton, 2016. 291 pp. $17

Eleven-year-old Annabelle McBride learns to lie because a sadistic newcomer to her rural Pennsylvania town pushes her to it. Betty Glengarry is several years older and uses her superior size, strength, and aggressiveness to work her will. She demands money, threatens Annabelle’s younger brothers if Annabelle doesn’t comply, and dishes out punishment that suggests what she’s capable of. Since it’s 1943, and everyone’s thinking about the war effort against Germany, it’s a nice touch to portray a young girl confronting a bully at home.

War Food Administration poster by Morley, 1945 (courtesy War Food Administration, Agriculture Department, via Wikimedia Commons)

In this engaging, evocative novel meant chiefly (but not solely) for children, I wish Wolk had taken more care to connect the dots, of which the bullying theme provides one example. Annabelle never once thinks about what purpose the war might have, or whether the adults around her live up to their patriotism. She doesn’t even recognize that the McBrides, as a farm family, can feed themselves more generously than city folk, whose lives are more strictly rationed–another opportunity missed.

Even so, Wolk derives power from small moments writ large. The key character here is Toby, a veteran of the previous war who’s never recovered from whatever he saw and did in battle. Toby strikes most people as odd, but, never having hurt anyone, he lives as he likes, as a hermit in the woods, and his eccentricities have never roused anything more hostile than gossip. Now, however, as Betty’s cruelties multiply, Toby becomes a convenient suspect. Annabelle gathers that Betty’s trying to frame him, and most people implicitly accept his guilt, preferring to blame a misfit rather than a sweet, innocent girl.

Annabelle therefore takes it upon herself to protect a man she knows as fragile and frightened, kind when you allow him to be. It outrages her particularly that her Aunt Lily ranks among his most outspoken (and wrongheaded) critics. But to protect Toby requires more and more deceit, which makes Annabelle uncomfortable, so there’s that. And as the net around him tightens, the more she discovers that adults whom she’d trusted to believe in fairness or justice seem ready to let their prejudices guide them instead. This too is a nice touch; she faces down a bully, whereas they attack the victim.

I like both the moral meat implied here and the manner in which Wolk serves it. Her clear, lucid prose makes me think that she believes in E. B. White’s rules for cherishing the English language; and her careful, loving portrayal of rural life evokes one of his favorite subjects and philosophy. Consider this passage:

Our old barn taught me one of the most important lessons I was ever to learn: that the extraordinary can live in the simplest things.
Each season meant a world refashioned inside its stalls and storerooms.
Pockets of warmth in winter, the milk cows and draft horses like furnaces, their heat banked by straw bedding and new manure.
In spring, swallows fledged from muddy nests wedged in crannies overhead, and kittens fresh and soft staggered between hooves and attacked the tails of tackle hanging from stable pegs.

But, as White also understood, children’s literature is no good without a strong element of subversion. Children see adult hypocrisy, cruelty, irrationality, and faithlessness more clearly than anyone else, because they’re tuned to it and suffer from it the most–think of Huckleberry Finn, Alice puzzling her way through Wonderland, or, more recently, Harry Potter’s struggles with evil incarnate. Wolk has the moral setup, for sure, delivered with admirable economy. Without fuss or heavy lifting, she gives you good versus evil, truth versus lies, the suffering of the innocents, and betrayal. What more could you want?

Answer: depth and ambiguity. Toby, Annabelle, and just about all her family are 100 percent good, despite a minor failing or two, whereas Betty is all bad, without a redeeming feature. Moreover, it’s not just that she’s bad; she’s a sociopath, a cliché that has ruined many a novel. As my seventeen-year-old astutely observed–he read the book over my shoulder during a long plane ride–Wolf Hollow would be far more gripping and believable had Annabelle rejected Betty’s friendly overtures, prompting a reaction. That would have redressed the balance between the characters, which Wolk could have fleshed out further had Betty’s cruelties seemed more like acting out or an attempt to get attention rather than cold-blooded violence. Instead, Betty has an accomplice in her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, with whom she gets up to who knows what, so she becomes that kind of girl–another cliché. And to overturn this axis of evil, Annabelle pulls off some rather improbable stunts, especially miraculous from so young a protagonist.

I give Wolk credit for daring to hurt her characters, both good and bad–she’s willing to show that life isn’t fair. But she’d have written a much better book had she not ducked two subversive truths: Good and bad aren’t always easy to see, and doing the right thing is usually more complicated than it appears.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lethal Delusions: The German War

17 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945, by Nicholas Stargardt
Basic, 2015. 570 pp. $35

Some books, no matter how harrowing their subject, how unrelenting, or how complex, display such mastery, vivid detail, and fresh perspective that they demand a reading. To me, The German War is one, though I shuddered and cringed my way through, sometimes cursing or even shouting in anger. That’s what happens when terrible history feels as if it took place yesterday.

Stargardt, who teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford, asks a question that many other historians have posed: How did the German people feel about the war they waged between 1939 and 1945?

That deceptively simple inquiry involves many interlocking pieces, among them the Holocaust, Allied bombing, euthanasia, rationing, German leadership, and Nazi ideology. Stargardt covers these and more, plumbing private letters, government documents, newspapers, film, and court cases. Perhaps most revealing about public attitudes, he cites reports from the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security arm of the SS, which gathered what people were saying among themselves. Having sifted through this stunning amount of material, the author conveys not only the implications of political and military decisions at the highest level, but how they affected the lives of sixteen individual Germans, in their own words.

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Stargardt has a myth-busting mission, which at times makes his narrative more than a little polemical. However, I think he succeeds, and it would be picky to condemn him for imperfect pitch when he shows why the most popular, accepted tunes are based on flat notes.

For instance, he demonstrates how the overwhelming majority of Germans supported both Hitler and the war effort, even to the end, even if they felt no sympathy with Nazism. This can be hard to understand, because most foreigners have grown up believing–or being taught–that the Nazis had somehow “brainwashed” an entire nation, that Germans obeyed out of fear, and that merely a fraction knew about the crimes committed in their names, let alone perpetrated them.

Not so, says Stargardt. Hitler was widely revered, and his radio broadcasts warmed the populace, lending them strength to bear ever-increasing sacrifices, even in the war’s final weeks. Many people assumed that if he’d only known of the daily injustices and hardships they suffered, he’d have corrected them. (The SD, as the Propaganda Ministry insisted, tolerated grumbling, so long as it betrayed no disloyalty.) Nobody welcomed the outbreak of war in 1939, except for the few who thought it an adventure, but, on the other hand, nobody questioned that the war was necessary to break the stranglehold of enemies threatening to destroy the Reich. Devout Christians, Catholic or Protestant, may have deplored the Nazi scorn for religion, but they agreed that Jews, as part of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy,” must be destroyed. Even in the last weeks, German forces bled freely for every inch of ground they yielded, as they had for almost six years. That tenacious, steadfast bravery could not have come from fear. Rather, the nation was determined not to surrender, as it had in 1918. Many fought on past the point of hopelessness to wipe away what they considered that old stain on the national honor.

As for what would later be called the Holocaust, the German public learned about it early and often. Not only did Hitler publicly promise on several occasions that Jewry would be wiped out, but on the Eastern Front, the army took part in mass killings, which were treated as perfectly natural. Soldiers described them in letters and took photos, which they showed to friends and family. The home front heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so forth as death camps, though exactly how they functioned remained secret. Few people even cared until Allied air raids began causing serious destruction and loss of life, at which time many Germans assumed that these were retribution for killing Jews. Many also believed that the Jews were behind the raids, whose perceived intent was to exterminate Germany. By the same logic, Germans implicitly accepted that they were victims, not perpetrators, and even after 1945, insisted they had fought a legitimate war of self-defense. Some 37 percent still believed that their security had demanded the murder of “non-Aryans.”

If there’s one thing missing in Stargardt’s account–hard to believe, given its length and depth–it’s how certain German attitudes remained unchanged from the First World War. The notion that Britain had conspired to “encircle” and “strangle” Germany out of jealousy dates from then, as do the mantra of a defensive war compelling invasion of other countries and the belief in German victimhood. Hitler didn’t have to fabricate these popular narratives, only recall them from his own days as an ardent soldier in a Bavarian regiment.

The German War can be hard going because of its subject matter. But I’m glad I read it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Slices of Life After Death: Wake

27 Monday Jul 2015

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Review: Wake, by Anna Hope
Random House, 2014. 293 pp. $26

You might think that the four-day runup to Armistice Day, 1920, in London, and the burial of the Unknown Warrior that took place, would make a thin premise for a novel. After all, what tension could there be in a public funeral? Moreover, the unidentified soldier, exhumed from a battlefield in northern France, has been dead for years and belongs to no one in particular.

Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey, London (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey, London (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

But he also belongs to anyone who suffered loss, which is to say, the whole nation. And as with any intimate, familial funeral, the coming ritual stirs fear, jealousy, pain, renewed grief, and fury, as well as harrowed hearts longing for release. Wake turns the national day of mourning into a family affair, one of many families. For most, loss has stunted them and left them unable to love or even venture outside their fears. Naturally, their paths cross in unusual ways.

There’s Evelyn, who works for the pension office. It’s an utterly thankless job, but she’s not looking for fulfillment. Her lover died in the war, and her younger brother, the only kindred spirit within the family, has returned from France a brittle wreck. He scorns Evelyn for being bitter, and maybe she is. But she also speaks of the anger that can’t go anywhere, because nobody will listen:

Someone should do the world a favor. They should take one of those great guns that they wheel out for the occasion and turn it around; they should train it on the massed dignitaries at the Cenotaph, in the abbey, on the king and Lloyd George and Haig and the whole lot of them, should shoot them while they sit there, their old heads bent in prayer. . . . Hypocrites, stinking hypocrites all.

There’s also Ada, who can’t quite believe her son is dead and sees his face in every crowd. Or Hettie, who makes sixpence a dance at a dance hall, and whose brother remains so shocked from the trenches that he seldom speaks or leaves his armchair.

I wasn’t surprised to read that author Hope once trained to be an actress, for her narrative often has a theatrical feel, clipping along in short scenes. She’s got an economical style, suggesting more than she shows. But cutting away before things get too complex sometimes feels like a bailout, and it restricts what you can see of her characters. This is especially true of the men, who appear to exist only in the moment, only on the surface.

By contrast, Wake portrays the women very well, showing how the war left them behind, in several ways. Evelyn curses the old soldiers who act as if they own the streets, the war, and its legacy. No matter what women did, or still do, they count for nothing by comparison, and all they hear is that their aspirations can and should go no further than having a husband and children. Without soapboxes or drumbeats, Wake vividly conveys this feminist rage, every ounce of which feels earned. Likewise, the class conflict between officers and “other ranks” comes through loud and clear, a truth that the praying hypocrites refuse to acknowledge.

On the downside, the crossed-paths aspect of Wake falls short. Hope’s a skillful storyteller, so the narrative fits together, but a few crossings feel contrived, and the coincidences mount up. Two are predictable, one of which she borrowed (perhaps unwittingly) from For King and Country, my favorite film about the war, starring Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde. I don’t fault her for this–all novelists borrow–and you might as well take from the best.

What I do object to is the attitude, universal in Wake, that, once the expected glory had faded by mid-1916, nobody in Britain fought except from fear of punishment. What nonsense. Unlike the case with France or Russia, Britain’s initial allies, no mutiny ever took place among British forces, and support remained strong for a war that barely touched England’s shores. Soldiers hated the trenches and, often, the generals, but most believed in the cause, and the reverence that accompanied the burial of the Unknown Warrior stemmed partly from national pride. That the politicians basked in this feeling, as if they’d invented and deserved it, doesn’t mean that the people who fought for them were dupes or slaves.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

No Time for Morality: Motherland

30 Thursday Apr 2015

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Review: Motherland, by Maria Hummel

Counterpoint, 2014. 375 pp. $26

The year 1944 is coming to a screaming, bloody close in Germany, but the war goes on, demanding ever more sacrifice. Frank Kappus, a reconstructive surgeon in Hannesburg, a spa town outside Frankfurt, has been drafted to an army hospital in Weimar. Two months widowed, he has remarried so that his three sons, the youngest of whom is an infant, have a mother to care for them while he’s gone.

Liesl, his new bride, must feed, clothe, and bring up three children who don’t know her. Food and clothing are impossible to find; air raids worsen life every day; the two elder boys run wild; and the neighbors treat her with suspicion and dislike, glad to tell her that she’s nothing like her beautiful, friendly, fun-loving predecessor. She’s done nothing wrong, but of course, that’s not enough. “The point was to be liked, or if you couldn’t be liked, to be overlooked.” And Liesel sticks out, leading people to wonder what secrets she has to protect.

One secret concerns eight-year-old Anselm (called Ani), the middle child, already young for his years, who’s been acting strangely, showing signs of cognitive damage, if not mental disturbance. A doctor has told Liesl that Ani may need to be evaluated at Hadamar, a psychiatric hospital where, it is whispered, the unfit are put to death. Frank Winkelmann Hadamar What Liesl does to keep him and her two other boys safe requires a remarkable degree of inner strength, which, she realizes, may vanish in an unguarded moment. Like the fine novelist she is, Hummel has set herself and her protagonist a tall task, for Liesl isn’t quite cut out for struggle. She grew up in her aunt and uncle’s home, treated like a servant among her six cousins:

Liesl had excelled at gratitude. She ate it for supper, always the last to be served. She wore it on her back, always clothed in her aunt’s stained, cast-off jumpers. She listened to it all night, positioned as nurse outside each incoming baby’s room, ordered to wake if he cried.

Meanwhile, Frank has his own troubles. He plans to desert if the Russians break through, only a matter of time, but that’s a deadly game. His superior, Captain Schnell (!) seems more devoted to punishing subversion than running a hospital, and when Frank hears a rumor that the medical officer at nearby Buchenwald may be infecting the inmates with typhus, Schnell warns him not to be curious. Frank takes the hint.

I admire much about Motherland, a novel head and shoulders above the other two I’ve reviewed here about wartime Germany (City of Women, David R. Gilham, December 11, 2014; The Undertaking, Audrey Magee, March 19). Hummel can make even a visit to the kitchen a tense occasion, and she captures the atmosphere of fear and deprivation without resorting to cartoon Nazis or melodrama. She’s also an excellent prose stylist. Women’s faces “looked as if someone had fixed their dread in stone.” Dust gathers on furniture, “as if it were ever so slowly growing a beard.” It’s details like these, rooted firmly in the mundane, that tell the story of day-to-day survival.

Yet Hummel lets her characters off the moral hook, despite her best efforts. She explains that she based her novel on family history, notably a series of letters that say nothing about the death camps or the totalitarian state, only about trying to cope. Okay. She resisted the temptation to allow her characters acts of resistance–wisely, I think–and says it hurt to leave out all but scant references to Jews or the Holocaust. (One brilliant, subtle description evokes the death camps and crematoria in a different, unexpected context.)

Fair enough. I accept that ordinary people, just trying to remain overlooked, would focus instead on where their next meal was coming from, especially when the bombs are falling. However, it’s those bombs that Liesl doesn’t think about, as in why Germany’s enemies are so relentless, or why the war has lasted so long. Nor does she ever connect the dots between the laws that may send Ani to Hadamar and those that condemn Jews.

Buchenwald was built in 1937, the first such camp on German soil, so Frank can’t be completely ignorant of what its purpose is, even if he’s never heard that inmates are injected with typhus. But he simply doesn’t think about it. Nor does he ever stop to consider that the horribly maimed men he treats have their counterparts on the other side. Nor, more broadly, does he reflect on what war has done to Europe.

Nevertheless, I could settle with this–in fact, I did, for almost the whole novel–except for the outrage that Liesl, in particular, expresses against the Americans. What they do is so unjust and heavy-handed, she believes, and I sense that the reader is meant to sympathize with her. But I can’t, not about this. Liesl never grapples with anyone else’s sufferings or how they might have come about. To me, Hummel squanders the empathy for Liesl and Frank that she’s so carefully built.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.