by Jo Ann Bender
364 pages
While wandering the aisles at BEA back in May I came across author Jo Ann Bender signing copies of her WWII fiction novel and had to get a copy for myself. The book sounded familiar to me, and I thought maybe I'd read a review of it on someone's blog. And of course I'm intrigued by anything set in this time period.Antoinette is the main character in this story. She is a young French girl living in a town which has just been occupied by the Nazis. The officers move into her house (her father is the mayor) and one of them takes an interest in Antoinette. Although he doesn't rape her, he does coerce her into his bed, and eventually she becomes pregnant. At this point the officer ships her to a Lebensborn, a home for women bearing racially pure children for the Fuhrer. And now Antoinette's adventures are just beginning!
The book got off to a great start. I enjoyed getting to know the characters and I felt like the story was very believable. It was a bit wordy and overly descriptive, but I could ignore that as long since the story was moving along at a nice pace. About halfway through the plot began to get more and more far-fetched. Around this time those excessive descriptions began to really annoy me. Add in a few plot holes and, in the end, I have to say that I was rather disappointed. It's a shame, because this book had a lot of potential.
7 comments:
I generally don't enjoy overly descriptive books, so this probably isn't for me.
Grrr. I hate it when a book kind of falls apart after I'm already to invested to stop reading.
That's too bad. I didn't come across this one. The cover is rather intriguing.
Overall, I liked this book, but I definitely know what you mean about the excessive description. However, after watching a documentary about the Nazis and some of their weird occult rituals, the plot didn't feel too far fetched for me on that aspect anyway.
I'll get your review linked on War Through the Generations.
Anna - It wasn't actually stuff that went on in the SS House that felt far-fetched to me - I've seen some of those same documentaries that you have and I know there was some weird stuff going on! I just felt like there were too many things that the main character got involved in, too many coincidences, to make it believable for me.
Too bad -- it had intrigued me!
Too bad. I love the cover.
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