Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
Good in that I learned some things I didn't know about resistance to the Nazis. Not a highbrow or literary read, but entertaining.
This book is stunning. Sad and at times horrifying too. Written about the lives of three women who are drawn together in Germany following Hitler's reign.
I’ve had this book for a long time and typical book horder that I am, I just got around to reading it over the last few days. And when I say reading, I mean I devoured it. I thought this book is getting off to a slow start first by about page 60 to the end I was up past my bedtime trying to see what’s going to happen to all the characters.
I was thinking about how to review this book and I’ve come up with a new system I’m going to try out, so bear with me here. I’m rating the book on readability, prose, and over all.
I’m defining readability as how absorbing the story was. I’m defining prose as how well the story is written and executed, and I’m calling the over all rating how well I liked it.
Why am I getting into the weeds so much, you ask (if anyone is reading this)? Well because I thought this was an extraordinary story extremely well written book, but I can’t say I liked that much in the end.
World War II stories have been very popular lately infection but this one goes beyond the Warriors and picks up basically right at the end of the war and runs through the 50s with some flash forward time to the 1990s. You get a very unique view of postwar life in Germany and the gray area between people who were once Nazis and who right now I’m trying to make their way in the post war world.
Marianne, Benita, and Ania are three of the most different people you can imagine, one is a Nazi, one is just a child growing up and hard world, and one is the wife of a man in a group of resistors who tried to kill Hitler.
I imagine their experiences during the war could’ve been fleshed out into an entire book. I am impressed though that the author managed to stay within her chosen time and story, and just give us tempting pieces without dragging her story into something else.
Maybe hearing more about the plot to kill Hitler would have made this a better book for me. Like I said you had the diverse characters, it was well written, you got to see what happened after the body of the story with the scene set in the 1990s, but I still didn’t like it. But like there’s like needless tragedy came to Connie and Benita and I wasn’t clear on why he married her in the first place. Even this letter which I thought would explain more made it feel like she was basically just a pretty face.
Maybe I just wasn’t looking for a depressing read? But that’s not entirely fair because Marianne and Ania are tolerably happy in the end, and they reconnected years after Marianne learned the truth about Ania’s background. So over all it was a good book it just didn’t particularly speak to me.
I was thinking about how to review this book and I’ve come up with a new system I’m going to try out, so bear with me here. I’m rating the book on readability, prose, and over all.
I’m defining readability as how absorbing the story was. I’m defining prose as how well the story is written and executed, and I’m calling the over all rating how well I liked it.
Why am I getting into the weeds so much, you ask (if anyone is reading this)? Well because I thought this was an extraordinary story extremely well written book, but I can’t say I liked that much in the end.
World War II stories have been very popular lately infection but this one goes beyond the Warriors and picks up basically right at the end of the war and runs through the 50s with some flash forward time to the 1990s. You get a very unique view of postwar life in Germany and the gray area between people who were once Nazis and who right now I’m trying to make their way in the post war world.
Marianne, Benita, and Ania are three of the most different people you can imagine, one is a Nazi, one is just a child growing up and hard world, and one is the wife of a man in a group of resistors who tried to kill Hitler.
I imagine their experiences during the war could’ve been fleshed out into an entire book. I am impressed though that the author managed to stay within her chosen time and story, and just give us tempting pieces without dragging her story into something else.
Maybe hearing more about the plot to kill Hitler would have made this a better book for me. Like I said you had the diverse characters, it was well written, you got to see what happened after the body of the story with the scene set in the 1990s, but I still didn’t like it. But like there’s like needless tragedy came to Connie and Benita and I wasn’t clear on why he married her in the first place. Even this letter which I thought would explain more made it feel like she was basically just a pretty face.
Maybe I just wasn’t looking for a depressing read? But that’s not entirely fair because Marianne and Ania are tolerably happy in the end, and they reconnected years after Marianne learned the truth about Ania’s background. So over all it was a good book it just didn’t particularly speak to me.
I'm not having much luck with books lately and I appear to be the minority in my rating of this book. I have so many books on my kindle that have yet to be read, and while I give every book a fair shake in its storytelling, I'm not going to continue reading a book I dislike just for the sake of reading it.
I found "The Women in the Castle" to be bland, confusing (because of all the time & character jumping), and just down right boring. None of the characters "spoke" to me. I found them all one-dimensional & rather depressing & unlikable. I found the choice of words that characters spoke at times to be out of step with the era being written about.
There are many other WWII historical fiction books that are better written & enjoyable to read.
I found "The Women in the Castle" to be bland, confusing (because of all the time & character jumping), and just down right boring. None of the characters "spoke" to me. I found them all one-dimensional & rather depressing & unlikable. I found the choice of words that characters spoke at times to be out of step with the era being written about.
There are many other WWII historical fiction books that are better written & enjoyable to read.
It's more of a 2.5
It was ok. Some parts were more interesting than others, and the ending was a bust.
It was ok. Some parts were more interesting than others, and the ending was a bust.
If only the first half had been as good as the second, perhaps it wouldn’t have taken me a year to finish. I could’ve done without the final chapter, the previous chapter was a very fitting end to a group of marginally likable characters. The final chapter just served to tie up a loose end for a character I had forgotten about. I wish the women had more substance rather than being talked about as though we as the reader should care. I found some moments sad certainly but none moving. I cried my eyes out with The Nightingale, but didn’t even come close to welling up with this book. It’s a bummer because I desperately wanted to read it, it sounded amazing, but I’m the end I just wanted to be done with the story.
This book had soooo much potential. I really wanted to love it, but the characters were never fully developed, and I never became engrossed with the storyline, nor the characters. Very disappointing.
What is hard? The Holocaust
Such a surprisingly good book about a terrible time in history. Human goodness prevails and learns to adapt and finally learns that there is a lot of grey in the middle of black and white.
Such a surprisingly good book about a terrible time in history. Human goodness prevails and learns to adapt and finally learns that there is a lot of grey in the middle of black and white.
I really loved this book. It was set partially during WWII but mostly in the years right afterward, focusing on a group of German women and how they survived after the war. The main protagonist is Marianne, a strong, morally upright woman who lives through the war only because she is a woman--her husband and other members of the German Resistance fail to assassinate Hitler and are caught and executed. The other women are Benita--the beautiful but superficial wife of Connie, one of Marianne's oldest friends with whom she also happens to be in love--and Ania, someone Marianne did not know before the war but whom she rescues afterward in order to fulfill her promise to keep safe the other widows of the Resistance. Shattuck does an excellent job of bringing to life the small postwar town (and castle) the women live in, the difficult and often conflicting feelings and actions of Germans after the war, and crafting the emotional connection between the women.
Heavier read than normal. An intriguing and poignant tale of connections forged in the worst and best of times. Although these women have a common bond, they realize they don't really know each other and all have secrets that must be kept. As they begin to see those secrets and lives unravel, they endure their own forms of encouragement and betrayal.
Challenges to this book: It took me longer to invest in the plot than normal. I had a difficult time keeping characters straight for the first half of the book, and kept waiting for more characters to show up. The author relied heavily on readers inferring events and places, and there were some important plot turns (Ania) that were glossed over. Jumping back and forth in time was necessary for the plot sequence, but also made it more difficult to remember who was who and where. Perhaps if I was more familiar with German geography, I would have found myself drawn in sooner.
I recommend for anyone interested in WWII history, especially those interested in different perspectives of the war.
Challenges to this book: It took me longer to invest in the plot than normal. I had a difficult time keeping characters straight for the first half of the book, and kept waiting for more characters to show up. The author relied heavily on readers inferring events and places, and there were some important plot turns (Ania) that were glossed over. Jumping back and forth in time was necessary for the plot sequence, but also made it more difficult to remember who was who and where. Perhaps if I was more familiar with German geography, I would have found myself drawn in sooner.
I recommend for anyone interested in WWII history, especially those interested in different perspectives of the war.