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A review by betsyrisen
This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke
4.0
Magical realism? Check. Hungarian Revolution of 1956? Check.
"She did not know how to remember and move on at the same time. Memory and forgetting were two weights on a scale of history. One must forget just enough to move forward, and remember just enough to avoid repeating the horrors of history."
"The statue faced west toward the river and over the hills, as if it peered right over the city and didn't see it. And that had been the way Stalin looked at Hungary during the war, and the way that Hitler looked at Hungary. To too many people, Hungary was nothing more than the gateway between east and west, into the Balkans and north into Europe. It was the crossroads, and it was in the crosshairs."
I am not a big fan of historical fiction, with few exceptions. I don't have a problem with magical realism, in most cases. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm just a little too close to the period in history that this book covers to be able to suspend belief and expand imagination enough to truly buy in.
The writing in this book was wonderful. The characters were very interesting and engaging. However, there was a lot going on, and a lot of bouncing between timelines and characters both living and dead, and I think it tried to do too much, or I just missed something. It was very difficult for me to understand especially the storyline of Csilla's father. At the very least I didn't see any real resolution to the tension that character presented, and that might be what was missing for me.
There was no way I wasn't going to read / finish this book, and I had to do some research into the author afterwards, which is what I always do whenever I read anything written about the revolution. It doesn't seem like Katherine Locke has any direct connection to the revolution, which I found interesting.
Except of course for the magical realism (which I'm not supposed to believe), I found the plot accurate and intriguing. I was consuming this as an audiobook, and was missing a lot of the Hungarian language until the first lines of the Nemzeti dal made tears instantly spring to my eyes.
"She did not know how to remember and move on at the same time. Memory and forgetting were two weights on a scale of history. One must forget just enough to move forward, and remember just enough to avoid repeating the horrors of history."
"The statue faced west toward the river and over the hills, as if it peered right over the city and didn't see it. And that had been the way Stalin looked at Hungary during the war, and the way that Hitler looked at Hungary. To too many people, Hungary was nothing more than the gateway between east and west, into the Balkans and north into Europe. It was the crossroads, and it was in the crosshairs."
I am not a big fan of historical fiction, with few exceptions. I don't have a problem with magical realism, in most cases. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm just a little too close to the period in history that this book covers to be able to suspend belief and expand imagination enough to truly buy in.
The writing in this book was wonderful. The characters were very interesting and engaging. However, there was a lot going on, and a lot of bouncing between timelines and characters both living and dead, and I think it tried to do too much, or I just missed something. It was very difficult for me to understand especially the storyline of Csilla's father. At the very least I didn't see any real resolution to the tension that character presented, and that might be what was missing for me.
There was no way I wasn't going to read / finish this book, and I had to do some research into the author afterwards, which is what I always do whenever I read anything written about the revolution. It doesn't seem like Katherine Locke has any direct connection to the revolution, which I found interesting.
Except of course for the magical realism (which I'm not supposed to believe), I found the plot accurate and intriguing. I was consuming this as an audiobook, and was missing a lot of the Hungarian language until the first lines of the Nemzeti dal made tears instantly spring to my eyes.