All the Broken Places by John Boyne

September 15, 2022September 26, 202217 Comments

I love John Boyne’s books and couldn’t wait to read his new one, All the Broken Places. It’s a sequel to his 2006 children’s novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but this time it’s aimed at adults. Although I haven’t read the first book, I have seen the film and that helped me understand the background of the characters and the references to things that had happened in the past. If you’re not familiar with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, though, I don’t think it would matter too much as this book does work on its own.

All the Broken Places begins in the present day, 2022, and is narrated by ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby. Gretel has lived in the same luxury apartment building in London since the 1960s; most of the other residents have also been there for a long time, so when a new family move into the flat below, Gretel is curious to meet her new neighbours. However, she is alarmed to discover that the family includes a nine-year-old boy, Henry, who brings back memories of her own brother at the same age – memories Gretel has spent her whole life trying to suppress.

As she gets to know Henry and his parents, Gretel quickly becomes aware that something is not right. She wants to help, but is afraid of making the situation worse. At the same time, she is forced to confront her own past when, as the young daughter of a Nazi commandant of a Polish concentration camp, she and her mother fled to France at the end of the war and tried to build new lives for themselves under new identities. Gretel has lived with the shame and guilt ever since, but now it seems she might have an opportunity to redeem herself.

As the story of Gretel’s life unfolds, we are taken on a journey from Poland to France, Australia and then England. Chapters set in the past alternate with chapters set in the present as Gretel battles with her conscience again to try to do the right thing for Henry. There are not many books with protagonists in their nineties and I admired her for the courage, resilience and wisdom she displays in old age, despite what she may have done or not done when she was younger.

I really enjoyed this book, although at times it’s an uncomfortable read and often a moving one. John Boyne has shown previously that he’s not afraid to tackle controversial subjects in his novels and I’m sure this is another one that will divide opinion. Some readers will take the view that anyone with any connection to the atrocities of the Holocaust deserves no pity; others will have sympathy for a twelve-year-old girl who, although she was at least partly aware of what was happening, lacked the strength, will and opportunity to do anything about it and has regretted it ever since. This is a theme Boyne has explored several times before, particularly in A History of Loneliness (a novel about the child abuse scandal within the Catholic church and probably my favourite of his books) – whether by turning a blind eye to the actions of others we are as much to blame as they are and whether it’s our responsibility to speak out if we know something is wrong.

This is a fascinating novel; it’s published today and I look forward to hearing what other people think of it.

Thanks to Doubleday for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 49/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

Mini-reviews: Ashes; A Net for Small Fishes; The Lost Diary of Venice

March 12, 2021March 12, 202110 Comments

Although I usually devote an entire post on my blog to every book I read, sometimes I find that I have very little to say. That’s not always necessarily a reflection on the quality of the book or how much I enjoyed it, but more an inability to put into words my thoughts about a particular book and an awareness that if I don’t just write something soon I will never get round to reviewing it at all! Three of my recent reads fall into that category, so here are a few paragraphs about each of them:

The first is Ashes by Christopher de Vinck, a novel set in Belgium during World War II. Simone Lyon, the daughter of a major general in the Belgian army, meets Hava Daniels while volunteering with the Red Cross in 1939 and despite their different backgrounds – Hava’s family are Jews from Poland – the two become close friends. In those innocent days at the beginning of the war, the girls believe their country will remain safe and neutral, untouched by the horrors starting to sweep across the rest of Europe. Less than a year later, Brussels is under German occupation and Hava and Simone become caught up in everything they’d hoped to avoid.

I found this a moving portrayal of friendship and loyalty, although I struggled to believe that Simone and Hava were really supposed to be eighteen years old as they felt a lot younger than that to me – in fact, I thought the whole story and the way in which it was written felt more like YA fiction than adult. Not a problem, but not what I’d expected! It was interesting to read about the Holocaust from a Belgian perspective and the quotes from politicians, news articles and Nazi propaganda which begin every chapter help to put everything into historical context, but the story was not quite as harrowing as books on this topic usually are. Maybe that was due to the pacing, as a lot more time is spent on building up Hava and Simone’s friendship than on describing the events that follow the Nazi invasion. Overall, this was a worthwhile read, but just didn’t have the sort of depth I prefer in a novel.

A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago is set much earlier, in Jacobean England, and tells the story of the real life Thomas Overbury Scandal from the perspective of Anne Turner, one of the people involved in the crime. Anne, the wife of a London physician, is also a businesswoman in her own right, holding the patent for yellow starch for collars and ruffs. Early in the novel, she becomes dresser and companion to Frances Howard, the young Countess of Essex – and when Frances falls in love with Robert Carr, the king’s favourite, it is Anne to whom she turns for help. Frances wants to marry Robert, but his friend Sir Thomas Overbury stands in their way; if only she and Anne could somehow get rid of him!

I think I would probably have enjoyed this book more if I hadn’t already read several other versions of the Overbury story, most recently EC Fremantle’s The Poison Bed and Rafael Sabatini’s The Minion. Being familiar with the story in advance took away the suspense and what was left wasn’t really enough to hold my attention. The choice of Anne as narrator, while interesting from the point of view of showing us how an ordinary citizen of the time might have viewed royalty and courtiers, took us further from the action, often leaving a sense that all the excitement was happening elsewhere. I also found Anne’s habit of referring to Frances as ‘Frankie’ very irritating as I didn’t think that name was in common use in the early 17th century. This book just wasn’t for me, but most of the other reviews I’ve seen are much more positive than mine! I do like the title, which is a reference to ‘small fishes’ being caught in the net of justice while the larger fish swim away.

The Lost Diary of Venice by Margaux DeRoux is a dual timeline novel; the present day narrative follows Rose, an expert in book restoration from Connecticut, and the historical one is set in Renaissance Italy. The connection between the two comes when William, an artist, brings a 16th century manuscript into Rose’s bookshop. Rose quickly discovers that the document is a palimpsest, where one set of words has been written over another which has been scraped away. On the surface it is a treatise on art by the great Italian painter Giovanni Lomazzo, but it’s the hidden diary entries and sketches underneath that really intrigue Rose and William.

It’s often the case that when a novel is set in two time periods, I like one much more than the other; with this novel, however, I didn’t find either of them very compelling. The book is well written, with some beautiful descriptions of Venice in the historical sections, but I didn’t feel any emotional connection to any of the characters. Rose’s relationship with the married William didn’t interest me and I was unmoved by Giovanni’s romance with the courtesan Chiara too (although I did have some sympathy for Giovanni as he discovered that he was losing his sight, a terrible thing for an artist to have to come to terms with). I also loved the glimpses we are given of the political situation in Venice at that time, the conflict between the Venetians and the Ottoman Empire, and the events taking place in Cyprus ahead of the Battle of Lepanto. I wished more time had been spent on all of this, as every time I started to become gripped by what was happening, the chapter ended and we switched back to the modern day story. This is not a book I can say I particularly enjoyed, but I’m pleased I was at least able to learn something from it.

Have you read any of these? If so, let me know what you thought.

Book 10, 11 and 12/50 read for the 2021 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman

May 30, 20146 Comments

In Love and Treasure, Ayelet Waldman traces the fate of a single item – a necklace with a peacock pendant – and uses it to tell the story of Hungary’s Jewish communities before and after the Holocaust. Spanning a period of one hundred years, the novel is divided into three separate stories, but there are links between all three and the peacock pendant plays an important role in each one.

The novel begins in 2013 with a conversation between Jack Wiseman and his granddaughter, Natalie, when he admits to her that the necklace she wore on her wedding day thinking it was her grandmother’s did not actually belong to her grandmother at all. The real owner, he says, is unknown, but he would like Natalie to find her and give the pendant back.

We then move back in time to Salzburg in 1945 where Jack is serving in the US army. He is given the responsibility for guarding the Hungarian Gold Train, a train containing the confiscated personal belongings of thousands of Hungarian Jews (paintings, watches, furs, cameras and other objects) but while he does his best to protect its contents he is forced to watch as his fellow army officers ‘borrow’ one item after another. When Jack’s days in charge of the train come to an end, he himself steals one of its treasures – the peacock pendant – because it reminds him of Ilona, a Jewish girl from the Hungarian town of Nagyvárad whom he has grown close to during his time in Salzburg.

Returning to 2013, Natalie is beginning her search for the original owner of the pendant – a search which will take her to Budapest where she joins forces with Amitai Shasho, an Israeli art dealer on a special mission of his own. This takes us into the final section of the book, set in 1913 Budapest and telling the story of a psychoanalyst and one of his patients, a young Hungarian suffragette whose strong views lead to her father wanting her treated for insanity.

Of the three main sections of the novel I think my favourite was the first one, the story of Jack and Ilona. Ilona is a survivor of the concentration camps and through her character, Waldman explores the lives of the Displaced Persons who lost their homes and their families during the war. I thought she did an excellent job of showing what it may have felt like to be a Jew displaced in Europe after the war had ended. I cared about Jack and Ilona in a way that I never really came to care about Natalie and Amitai, so I was sorry to leave them behind when I reached the end of the first section and moved on to the second.

I also enjoyed the final part of the book: narrated by the psychoanalyst, Dr Zobel, this is the only section to be written in the first person rather than the third, and I thought his narrative voice was very strong and distinctive – just what I would expect from a man of his profession in 1913.

I found Love and Treasure a very interesting read because it introduced me to subjects I knew little or nothing about. The Hungarian Gold Train, for example, really existed, yet it’s something I had never read about before and I thought it was fascinating. While the book didn’t really affect me emotionally as much as I would have expected from a novel about the Holocaust, the fact that it was so intriguing from an historical perspective made up for it.

I read this book as part of the Love and Treasure Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tour. For more reviews, interviews and guest posts please see the tour schedule.