Review by New York Times Review
When Marianne von Lingenfels's husband, Albrecht, and his friends hesitate to pursue their plans to resist Adolf Hitler, fearing its effect on their wives and children, she challenges them to take action. We, your families, will support you, she insists. Marianne is not yet the force she will become in the course of Shattuck's moving novel, but she knows Hitler is a madman, a thug, a dangerous rabble-rouser. This scene takes place in the novel's prologue, set in 1938 as the von Lingenfelses are presiding over their annual party at the family castle. Some male guests sport gaudy new Nazi insignia, others plot resistance in Albrecht's study, including Marianne's dashing childhood friend, Connie, who appoints her the "commander of wives and children"; introduces her to his pregnant fiancée, Benita; and at the night's close, kisses Marianne with surprising intensity. The party is unforgettable, for her and for the reader. The novel then flashes forward to June 1945, at the end of the war. Shattuck has shoehorned her fictional characters into the plot led by the real-life conspirator Claus von Stauffenberg, and the men have been executed after that failed assassination attempt. Now Marianne is combing Germany for their widows and children: Benita is rescued from a Russian rape den in Berlin; Connie's son turns up in a children's home; and grave, resourceful Ania, another survivor, is retrieved with her two sons from a displaced persons camp. All are brought to the castle to recover with Marianne's three children. Although she creates an odd family of sorts, this is definitely not a story of plucky women banding together to fix up a chilly home. Their recoveries are burdened with unending guilt, and while they're sharing the deprivations of the present, very often they're keeping secrets about the traumas of the past, even from one another. Shattuck's characters represent the range of responses to fascism. Her achievement - beyond unfolding a plot that surprises and devastates - is in her subtle exploration of what a moral righteousness like Marianne's looks like in the aftermath of war, when communities and lives must be rebuilt, together.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 9, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The last party at the ancient von Lingenfels castle is the occasion of a meeting of a group that is committed to resisting the Nazis. Among them is Marianne von Lingenfels' husband. Another resister is her childhood sweetheart, who extracts from her a promise to look after Benita, his pregnant wife-to-be. When the resisters are executed in 1944 for their part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, Marianne rescues Benita and her son from dire conditions in Berlin and takes them to the castle to live with her and her own three children. Later, they are joined by Ania, who has been identified as another resister's widow and has fled with her two sons from the Russian advance in the east. The narrative unfolds in a fluid way, with most of the action taking place in 1945, when the women struggle through the harrowing last days of the war, and 1950, when they adjust to new, postwar realities. The reader is fully immersed in the experiences of these women, the choices they make, and the burdens they carry. Shattuck (Perfect Life, 2009) has crafted a rich, potent, fluently written tale of endurance and survival.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Shattuck (The Hazards of Good Breeding) explores the lives of three widows at the tail end of World War II in this redemptive tale. Marianne von Lingenfels, whose husband was one of many resisters murdered in a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, returns to the beautiful but dilapidated Bavarian castle, Burg Lingenfels, as the war comes to an end. At the outset of the war she had promised her friend, another resister, that she would watch over his wife Benita and their child if anything happened to him. Seeking safety in numbers after the death of husbands, Marianne invites Benita to live with her-as well as another widow, Ania, and her two sons. As new chapters in their lives are written, the women come to rely on each other as a makeshift family-much as the entire country, reeling after the horrors of the war, must imagine a new future and forge a new identity. Shattuck's latest has an intricately woven narrative with frequent plot twists that will shock and please. The quotidian focus of the story, falling on the period just after the war, provides a unique glimpse into what the average German was and was not aware of during World War II's darkest months. Shattuck's own German heritage and knack for historical details adds to the realism of the tale. A beautiful story of survival, love, and forgiveness. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Inspired by the Shattuck's (The Hazards of Good Breeding) own grandparents' experience during World War II, this novel follows three German women before, during, and after Hitler's rule. Marianne is the widow of a Resistance leader whose failed attempt to kill the Führer leads her, as an act of personal atonement, to shelter the wives and children of his fellow conspirators within the walls of her family's Bavarian castle. Benita, one of those widows, reluctantly joins this refuge, silently suffering from her war experience until a new love interest ignites tension between her and Marianne. Their rift is amplified by the presence of Ania, the third widow in the castle, whose secrets unravel as she tries to remarry and protect her children. The story line continues through multiple decades, until a reunion forces the three women to reconcile their past behavior toward one another. There are too many ideas in this novel; as each emotional arc builds, the narrative abruptly switches to another character's voice, confusing the reader. Ania's story is most compelling, given her hidden identity, but readers will have to triangulate numerous characters and narrative devices before reaching her reckoning. VERDICT Fans of World War II fiction may want to consider. [See -Prepub Alert, 10/31/16; library marketing.]-Tina Panik, Avon Free P.L., CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three German "widow[s] of the resistance," who spend time together at a run-down castle when World War II ends, embody aspects of the catastrophe that overcame their country.Germany, 1945: in this devastated landscape where "no one was innocent," there is misery for all and plenty to spare. Guilt, shame, suffering, and silence go hand in hand as the German people emerge from war and fascism, and Europe is awash with displaced persons. Shattuck's (Perfect Life, 2009, etc.) third novel centers on the von Lingenfels castle, a place of aristocratic indulgence in prewar years, now a ruined shell owned by Marianne von Lingenfels, the widow of Albrecht, one of a group of men who failed in an attempt to assassinate Hitler and were hanged. It's this group which links Marianne to the two other women and their children, whom she invites to the castle for shelter: Benita Fledermann, widow of the charismatic Constantine, who survived the Russian occupation of Berlin but paid a heavy price; and Ania Grabarek, who walked west, out of the wreckage of Poland, with her two sons and is also keeping secrets about what she has seen and done. In this primer about how evil invades then corrupts normal existence, Shattuck delivers simple, stark lessons on personal responsibility and morality. Inevitably, it makes for a dark tale, more a chronology of three overlapping, contaminated, emblematic lives than a plot. Some final uplift does arrive, however, via the views of the next generation, which apply a useful layer of distance and some hope on the sins of the fathersand mothers. Neither romantic nor heroic, Shattuck's new novel seems atypical of current World War II fiction but makes sincere, evocative use of family history to explore complicity and the long arc of individual responses to a mass crime. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
