I should have stuck to just the Kindle version...

This is my second and a half book by Hawker and I truly do appreciate her style and her passion for the genre she writes in. The novel is absolutely solid, the writing rich and detailed with only the occasional overwritten passage or situation which might ring false (I found the spy/message situation questionable, for example. The amount of time Pohl spoke with Anton and the extreme details he shared as Anton and he exchanged messages seems, to me, highly improbable and at time conflicting with previous descriptions in the passage).

There were only two things that really prevented my absolute enjoyment and the inconsistency in point-of-view is the first. Although Starzmann's POV was central, on occasion I was bounced about in some other character's head and I was having to ask, "Yes, but how could Starzmann KNOW that?" On other occasions, the prose was directed at the reader with things like "you", "your" or "our" (i.e., our little village; in prose, not in dialogue) and that really tripped me up. I might be highly sensitive to this but it did detract.

I also had both the Kindle and audiobook versions (I was doing Whispersync), and it is really unfortunate that the performance was not at all up to par. First, the mix of British English dialects (some very broad) for various characters, based in Germany, in the same town, really did me in (I sometimes had to laugh out loud and it was not a funny scene), and then the children's and female's voices reminded me of a Monty Python skit. That really distracted.

That said, this WW2 novel portrayed, to great depth and with freshness, an extraordinary man and his family. The opening was already surprising and I was immediately invested. There were rich layers of plot, too--internal and external motivations, self-doubt, and despair were well balanced with hope, every-day hilarity (I was laughing out loud in public listening to Maria and the Communion dress escapade), and real relationship building.

Hawker has delivered a very well-written novel while honoring Anton Starzmann, the man. I will definitely be reading more and am already looking forward to her next two projects!!

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

1 Person fand das hilfreich