Reviews tagging 'Antisemitism'

The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

2 reviews

romie_chat's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

first read, march 2019
I feel like someone broke my heart and I'm never going to be fine again.

second read, january 2022
I may not be as in love with this book as I was the first time I read it, but it still holds a very special place in my heart, and for that, I'm thankful (4.32)

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gleeful_vector_of_chaos's review

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

 Another book down in 2021 and another really great read! I didn't really know what to expect going into this one; each quarter I participate in a reading challenge where the team leaders each choose a book that you can read for extra bonus points and this was one of them so I pretty much went into it with my head and my heart wide open. And I'm glad because I wound up completely loving it. Keep reading for the CAWPILE breakdown and why I loved it so much...

Title: The Girl with the Red Balloon
Author: Katherine Locke
Page Count: 319
CAWPILE Rating: 9.14
Star Rating: 5

Characters - 9/10
Our main character, Ellie, is a fairly typical YA main character, she's "normal", she's "everyday", she's kind of shy and doesn't really like to party (though of course her best friend is the complete opposite), and she finds herself suddenly in the middle of a grand adventure. Despite all of this, I found her immensely likeable. Maybe it's because she never had that "I'm not like other girls" thing about her, maybe it's because when she was thrown back in time to 1988, yeah she was scared at first, and yeah it took some getting used to, but the author didn't let her mope for too long, and pretty soon she was helping to kick ass. I also appreciated how explicit the author was with her Jewish heritage; and by that I mean we see Ellie struggle with her grandfather's lingering trauma from surviving the holocaust, and we hear her talk about different Jewish customs and traditions and Locke did well to toe the line between dumbing it down too much for non-Jewish readers but still making it workable. Ellie as a character carried the novel well and her struggle to decide to stay in 1988 or go back to 2017 was visceral, I felt her indecision and it made me as emotional as she was.

Locke also did well with the other characters, Kai was a great love interest, and I would love to read more about his and Sabina's Romani heritage and upbringing. Mitzi brought some much needed levity to the novel and yet she was never flat or one-dimensional, there was a wealth of emotion and depth to her. Ashasher, Aurora, and Felix were each mysterious and intriguing, making me constantly guess which of them were the antagonist. The inclusion of Benno was an interesting choice, and gave an interesting glimpse into both Aurora and Ellie's history and I think he was included just the right amount without overwhelming Ellie's story. Locke got me to a point with this book that if they were to ever write a follow up book about ANY of them I would gladly read it, but at the same time I never felt like I wasn't getting enough of their character. It's a hard balance to strike but Locke did it well.

Atmosphere - 9/10
Writing about such a dark period of time, the early 1940's for Benno, and 1988 for the rest of characters, has to be hard. You would be constantly torn between the story you want to tell, as well as the respect you would feel that needed to be paid to those who lived through these times and the atrocities they faced. Finding that balance, is something else that I think Locke excelled at. There were moments of levity, mostly in the 1988 chapters, but they never made light of what the characters (and what real people) were going through, rather it was a type of dark, survivalist humour that felt played well with the time period. A lot of the book felt very solemn but it never dragged or made me want to stop reading.

Writing Style - 8/10
Much like with atmosphere, I think Locke found a great balance between moments of lyricism and moments that furthered the story. Those moments of lyricism suited the genre and the magical complexities of the plot well but nor did they weigh the novel down and prevent it from progressing.

Plot - 10/10
I thought in particular was skillfully thought out (clearly, I gave it a 10/10). I haven't read a lot of this type of fantasy, magical realism, and this is probably the book I've enjoyed the most. The magical system and world building was incredibly well thought out and beautiful (with that beautiful imagery of the red balloons) and if there are any gaps in logic I certainly never picked up on them. The plot itself, following Ellie in her travel back in time, meeting Kai and Mitzi, and picking up the mystery of the tampered balloons and following it through to it's conclusion, was, for me, incredibly well paced. I never felt like the story was dragging, nor did I feel like we were rushing through and missing moments; there was this really lovely balance between the main mystery of how Ellie had been transported back in time, with moments where Kai, Mitzi, and Ellie just got to be teenagers and friends. I truly didn't know until the end who the antagonist was going to be, and kept half-expecting Felix to turn out to be evil, and it was interesting seeing how Aurora could go from saving people to killing people so quickly, and how her motivations were completely justified to her. The ending was heartbreaking but expected. I don't cry a lot at media, but this ending had me tearing up because as I said before, you could feel viscerally the pain Ellie had to make choosing between staying with Kai and Mitzi (both of whom you could tell she loved deeply) and going back to her family in 2017. There was no non-heartbreaking option. I'm usually not a fan of open endings but I didn't mind this; yes, technically we don't know if Ellie made it back to 2017 safely and whether she would remember Kai and 1988 at all, but I like to think she did. Maybe I'm just an optimist like that.

Intrigue - 9/10
I've sort of already covered this, but yes the intrigue was totally there. Like I said, I truly didn't know who of Ashasher, Aurora, or Felix was going to turn out to be the mastermind behind the whole thing, and they all seemed like equally likely possibilities to me. And at no point did I ever want to stop reading the novel, I just wanted to keep going to find out what happened to them all, not just who was the evil one.

Logic - 9/10
This one is a little hard to rate just because of the genre itself; magical realism or fantasy by it's nature does not follow our laws of logic (and thank fuck for that, how boring would it be if everything was logical all the time?). But if I look at the laws of logic that Locke set out for the world they constructed then I would say the novel was fairly logical. I certainly can't find any gaps or oversights, and honestly even if I did, I think I would forgive them just for how much I enjoyed the novel. Which brings me to....

Enjoyment - 10/10
Look, imma just go ahead and say it: I enjoyed tf out of this novel. It made me smile, it made me cry, it made me feel things, and most of all, it made me want to keep reading. I want more of this world that Locke has made, I want to read more about Kai and Mitzi, about Sabina and Ashasher, and more about Aurora and her descent from the girl she was in the 1940's to who she had become by 1988. I want it all.

Once again, when I tallied up and averaged according to the CAWPILE method I got a rating of 9.14 out of 10 which converts to 5 stars. And again this felt right. It's been interesting using this CAWPILE method to rate my books because before this I tended to rate with stars going by feeling; so having a slightly more mathematical way to decide and comparing that to the star rating I was feeling has been cool to see. I'd defiitely recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in historical novels and particularly late 20th-century-Germany as well as a love for magic. Or really just anyone who can appreciated a well constructed magical world. I don't think you'd regret checking out this book. 

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