Heidi Diehl

Thanks to The Book Club Cookbook, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and author Heidi Diehl for a copy of this book. My thoughts and opinions are my own.

At the risk of being trite - "there was no there, there." I read the entire book, all 317 pages, and kept waiting for it to get better. It should have been a good book: the characters were varied, the locations were interesting and different for me (Germany after WWII), the topics of art and creativity, family, relationships, history, architecture....all were ripe for a good novel. But somehow the author wrote well about all of these things without adding an ounce of drama. No plot, no drama - pretty much nothing happened. Certainly not enough happened to justify publishing, let alone reading this novel. And when the book finally ended there was only one way to tell - I turned the page and found the author's acknowledgements. I re-read the blurbs on the back jacket praising this book. I did not find it "riveting," nor was it a "complex novel that builds with subversive power to an assured ending." I can't recommend this book.… (altro)