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coralrose 's review for:
Fault Lines
by Nancy Huston
The first, Fault Lines has an interesting premise (family secrets told by four generations of six-year-olds, starting with the story of the most recent) about an interesting subject (the blond, blue-eyed children stolen from their families and given to German families to bolster up the Aryan race during WWII) that I quite literally devoured on the trip down. I left at 5:45 in the morning, and by the time I landed at noon, I had been finished and digesting for at least an hour. Because I read it so fast, I guess it’s hard to say that the book wasn’t good, but…the first voice was so brutal. I pray that no six-year-old has all that perverted hatred for humanity going on in their super-genius mind, for one, and I know that no six-year-old, super-genius or not has that kind of grasp on abstract reality. It didn’t read true, and it nearly made me throw up. But it got better. The next three voices were much more believable (maybe not as six-year-olds, but children, at least) and the story really started to grip in. I’m not sure I quite believe in the same kind of familial scarring as Huston portrayed, where a trauma in one generation ripples down to create a super monster three generations later. I mean, I believe that the sins of the father will be visited on the children, but I didn’t follow how the disconnect created during the war resulted in a war-mongering kindergartner. Maybe I missed the boat. It was well-written, but I thought could have been better thought out. I might see what else she has out there that is translated. Only read this on if you have a strong stomach, since the first quarter of the book is not for the faint of heart, and somewhat unnecessary.