Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
The things I didn’t like about this were legion, so I’ll limit it to a few. An advantage of epistolary books is that it gives the author different voices, but the voices here were all the same (and nothing at all like immediately post-war Britain). Moreover, a limitation is that you really can’t use them as info dumps with any credibility; you have to give up the third-person omniscient author voice.
The heroine was ridiculous, a perfect person universally adored. And the history was exploitative; it was used to give the story heft, but there was no reality to it. Akin to Holocaust stories with the same fatal flaw — oops, the author went there too. Where didn’t she go?
But I acknowledge mine’s a minority opinion!  |
I can definitely see the points you were making. It may even reinforce their validity that while reading those exploitative passages, I thought more of my friend growing up in Scheveningen through the war, a Jewish friend whose family fled to Switzerland and others I know or know of who lived the experiences for real rather than her recounting of them.