I should have loved The Women in the Castle; it had all the making of a book I would enjoy including WWII, female leads and mysterious pasts but it fell a little short.
“All right,” Connie said, turning his intense gaze upon her. “Then you will see to it that they are all right. You are appointed the commander of wives and children.”
On the night news broke about kristallnacht Marianne von Lingenfels was tasked by her husband, Albrecht, and her best friend, Connie Flederman, to take care of the women and children left in the wake of their plan to assassinate Hitler. After the war ends Marianne, who took this promise seriously, tracks down Connie’s wife, Benita, who spent the last months of the war in a hospital bed and their son, Martin, who Benita presumed dead. Marianne also tracks down the wife of another resistance member, Ania, who has two sons and a haunted past. The three women and their children navigate the early days of a post war Germany and form a family of sorts.
The narration jumps between all three women and bounces around between the women’s lives during the war as well as their pre-war selves. The bulk of the story takes place at the castle in the years following the war before wrapping up in the early 90s. I haven’t read a lot of books that focus on the aftermath of the war in Germany so it was a new and interesting point of view to focus on.
“Standing at the grave, Marianne was suddenly aware of her own blindness; her dearest friends were like dreams she had woken from. How had she missed so much?”
Shattuck is an excellent writer and while many of the passages were beautifully written but I struggled to get into this one. Something about the pacing was off and while I didn’t mind the flash-backs, they served a purpose narration-wise, some things felt overtly shocking. Benita and Ania have complicated pasts that are slowly unraveled to the reader and even slower to their benefactor. Marianne’s story is more straightforward; she is ostensibly the lead character in this drama and essentially the linchpin that ties Benita and Ania’s more intriguing stories together. While Benita and Ania’s pasts shape their present day decision making it is Marianne’s self righteousness that fuels her choices.
Mild spoiler below.
I also found it incredibly odd that over half the main characters ended up in America. Was this commonplace for Germans in the decades following WWII?