This was a really good book on a lot of levels: 1. Good as historical fiction. Excellent particularly because we get POV characters on both sides of the conflict. 2. Good as literary fiction (at least, according to my standards). I prefer my lit-fic to be on the accessible side, and not to focus exclusively on middle-aged white man problems. But it’s also got extra levels if you want to go digging. 3. Good as writing, in the sense that the sentences strung one after […]
Medical horrors on the eve of Hitler’s takeover
A murder mystery and quasi-historical novel in one, Grossman gives us Berlin on the verge of the Nazi takeover in 1932. A surgically altered corpse, missing sleepwalkers, a famous hypnotist and a Nazi doctor all enter the picture during the murder investigation undertaken by decorated German WWI veteran and celebrated homicide detective Willi Kraus. A widower with two sons, Kraus is also a Jew who is at first as blind to the ramifications of his investigation as he is to the rising tide of fascism. […]
“My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded.”
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a whimsical mystery with a creepy underbent. It balances a scary proposition — little girls going missing in a small German town where everyone knows each other — with the idealistic naivete of its 10 year old protagonist, who understands on one level that the girls who go missing are her classmates, near and around her age, but doesn’t make the connection that she may herself be in a particular danger. It’s this dramatic irony that propels the story, […]
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