tonstantweader 's review for:

The Night Travelers by Armando Lucas Correa

medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

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The Night Travelers treads lightly on the familiar ground of The German Girl. Again we have the story of Ally, a mother saving her daughter Lilith from genocide by sending her to Cuba. Lilith repeats her mother’s sacrifice, sending her daughter Nadine from Cuba’s communism for New York, and then Nadine’s daughter Luna returns to Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall to learn about her family. This book takes us through four generations rather than two and seems more appropriate for a mini-series where that one felt like a movie.

The Night Travelers seems as though it would make a good mini-series with perhaps one night per generation. It is possible actors, by dint of being different people, would add more to the characters who are somewhat flat. For example, four different women growing up in different countries and in different eras should sound and act differently. I should be able to know who is speaking by their voice, not their words. Generations are not duplicates, but new castings. There just was too little differentiation in the women.

The plot is interesting, though, already familiar from The German Girl. IAs with that book, his inspiration comes from the voyage of the St. Louis, a refugee ship that was turned away by the Cuban, American, and Canadian governments, forced to return to Germany where many of its passengers died in the Holocaust. Lucas Correa, a Cuban writer living in exile, has been inspired by the stories of the 28 passengers allowed to debark in Cuba. For more about the St. Louis, there is quite a bit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. [ Click here to read.]

I received an e-galley of The Night Travelers from the publisher through NetGalley

• The Night Travelers at Atria | Simon & Schuster
• Armando Lucas Correa author site

 

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/19/the-night-travelers-by-armando-lucas-correa/