Wasn't what I was hoping for

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kristinec Avatar

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I don't know about this one. The best part was the historical fact about the real Stella (I mean "best" pretty lightly; it was pretty awful, but it was definitely the most interesting bit I got out of the book).

I absolutely love WW2 hist fic, especially drawing on real people/real events (by events I'm talking more than just WW2 actually happened, but like these specific niche events). But this one didn't land for me. Friedrich was soooooo painfully naive; so flipping easy to be taken advantage of. I mean, honestly, he's like I'm an uber wealthy Swiss 19 year old and I don't believe any of this "nonsense" people are saying about the war and that Germans hate Jews, even though absolutely everyone is warning me against it, I'm smarter than all these people and I'm going to go to Berlin to see it for myself, and whilst I'm there I'm going to blindly trust absolutely everyone and only start asking questions when they know FAR too much about me, but hey I'm Swiss so like they can't touch me, right? Ugh, give me a break.

Like I get it, there were super stupidly naive people. We have the beauty of hindsight to see how "obvious" it was how bad things were in Berlin et al. But my dude was in Berlin, no longer sheltered in some outskirts getting news only through German propaganda. My gosh he was sleeping with the truth and still was aloof from the situation.

The back cover blurb describes this as a tortured love story, but I dunno, my friends. Is it even love what we just experienced? Blind infatuation is more like it.

When I started writing this review, I thought 2 stars felt too low but 3 was too high. My gut feel was it really was just okay. Now that I finish, yeah 2 stars is as high as I can go, not even 2 point something.

And maybe we could have put that historical fact about Stella at the front as that would have really helped me understand what was going on with all these cases that were being slotted in at the start of chapters, because I didn't really undersatnd what was happening there until the author's note, which some people might not even read!