Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I hope all of you were as blessed as we were this Christmas–with family, with warmth and comfort, and with the Savior’s love.  There is more family to come as the new year approaches, but for now, I get to review for you the book I finished listening to while wrapping presents on Christmas Eve.  Jessica Shattuck’s The Women in the Castle sounded like exactly the sort of book that appeals to me–fellow widows of German resistance fighters gathering in a crumbling down castle to support each other and face life in postwar Germany–and I was quite excited when Britt offered me her extra copy.  Upon reading it, however, I found that the book is a good deal more complicated than that.  It both was and wasn’t my sort of book.

The back of it quotes the NY Times–“Moving…A plot that surprises and devastates”–and the USA Today–“The Women in the Castle stands tall among the literature that reveals new truths about one of history’s most tragic eras”; both of those blurbs strike me as accurate.  The blurb on the front, however, caught my eye first.  The author of a recent bestseller (The Nest) is quoted there as saying “A joy to read, this is a beautiful and important book.”  I looked at that a number of times during the course of the novel, and while I’m not going to quibble with ‘beautiful’ and ‘important’ as adjectives–it’s certainly beautifully written, as well as being the kind of thought provoking that can’t help but be enlightening in its way–nothing about this book struck me as a joy to read.  Compelling, yes, powerful, yes, but a joy?  Seriously?

As I read it, I couldn’t help but think of a memoir called We Were Not Alone:  How an LDS Family Survived World War II Berlin.  I suppose I had wanted Shattuck’s book to contain those same themes of trying to be true to one’s conscience in an unconscionable world–and being blessed for it.  Instead, it spotlighted differing German views of the war, the Nazis, and a people’s moral responsibility, embodied in three very different women whose bond was not at all what I wanted it to be.  I wanted them to build relationships based on trust that would sustain them in postwar life, but that did not feel like the point at all.  Shattuck, to her credit, does an excellent job of showing me why that was–I imagine what she describes was painfully real for many, many people–but I’ve always loved stories about healing and overcoming, and that wasn’t quite the vibe here.  Surviving, yes–in different kinds of ways–but what true healing and overcoming there was didn’t happen when (or how) I was expecting it to.  I find myself thinking of The Kite Runner, which was beautiful and painful and, at the very end, cautiously hopeful, but no more than that.  I respect the level of thought The Women in the Castle inspired in me, but it was an emotionally difficult rather than an emotionally satisfying read.  Whether or not you ought to read it depends entirely, then, on what you’re looking for.*

*I ended this sentence this way because it’s exactly how I wanted it to sound; in the interest of full disclosure, however, I still struggle to look at the preposition ending a 3-paragraph post.  It works, but it hurts.