Book Synopsis:
Annelise is a dreamer: imagining her future while working at her parents' popular bakery in Feldenheim, Germany, anticipating all the delicious possibilities yet to come. There are rumors that anti-Jewish sentiment is on the rise, but Annelise and her parents can't quite believe that it will affect them; they're hardly religious at all. But as Annelise falls in love, marries, and gives birth to her daughter, the dangers grow closer: a brick thrown through her window; a childhood friend who cuts ties with her; customers refusing to patronize the bakery. Luckily Annelise and her husband are given the chance to leave for America, but they must go without her parents, whose future and safety are uncertain.
Two generations later, in a small Midwestern city, Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, is a young woman newly in love. But when she stumbles upon a trove of her grandmother's letters from Germany, she sees the history of her family's sacrifices in a new light, and suddenly she's faced with an impossible choice: the past, or her future. A novel of dazzling emotional richness, Send for Me is a major departure for this acclaimed author, an epic and intimate exploration of mothers and daughters, duty and obligation, hope and forgiveness.
My Review:
2/5 stars. I really didn’t like this book. I hated the writing style - it was so choppy and inconsistent - which was a major distraction throughout my reading. The plot of the book is barely what it’s described as, and the characters weren’t really compelling. There were a few parts that were interesting, but the book as a whole was not enjoyable.
I wanted to like this book. I love historical fiction, and the premise sounded so interesting. I like stories about WWII, but that aspect of the book was actually surprisingly minimal. The main characters are Jews, and they face social persecution, but there's nothing about the actual war or the holocaust. The book was mostly about the relationships between the characters.
The biggest thing that made this book so hard to read was the writing style. The verb tense and the point of views were constantly switching with no breaks or warning. It was mostly in present tense (plus being in third person made that a confusing combination) but sometimes it would randomly switch to past tense when talking about a memory, or even future tense, which made no sense. The book would be from one character's POV, then suddenly go to another character's perspective a paragraph later, with nothing to clearly mark the change. The number of different characters we get the perspective of was overwhelming.
Some of the writing was just downright bad. It was full of incomplete sentences - just an action, or just a subject - including a sentence that literally just the word "but" followed by a period. That's not an author-specific style choice, that's improper grammar.
Another thing that added to the disorganization of this book was the constant time jumps. Early on, each chapter would be a completely different year than the previous chapter, and there were no chapter headers to mark what year it was. One chapter would be Annelise as a teen, and then it would jump back to her parents when she was first born. This was really jarring and I felt like I was spending so much time just figuring out the timeline of events. Part 3 was much more strictly chronologic and mostly from one perspective the whole time, but that was an exception.
The description of the book implies that there are two different full stories that are connected - Annelise and Clare. Annelise's story is all there, but Clare's just feels completely pointless. Her "story" barely includes the letters she finds, it's more about her love life with no connection to anything from the past. It's super short and has nothing to do with the story as a whole. Her part feels like a completely separate plot that's thrown into the book to make it more interesting - which it failed to do.
Lastly, the ending, if I can even call it that. The book ends super abruptly and with no explanation. The end of the book reads like the end of a chapter that would be in the middle of the novel. It was as if the author got to the end of a chapter, then was told she had to publish the book immediately. It also didn't even make sense. There was no conclusion to anything, it was just a thing that happened, then it ended. That was it. It wasn't an unfinished ending like a cliffhanger ending would be, it was just unfinished. The ending didn't leave me hanging, it just left.
Both the plot and characters of this book were boring. I felt like I didn't learn anything about the main characters' personalities. It was a whole lot of descriptions of their feelings, but not a whole lot of actual characterization. There were a lot of characters in the book, but I couldn't name any big things that make them unique and different from each other that isn't surface level. In terms of the plot being boring, nothing really happened. Sure, things happened, but there wasn't an inciting incident, rising action, and climax. All the events of the story were so chopped up that it took away any narrative development. One reviewer said "there is no way to give spoilers for this novel because nothing is revealed", and I think that's a very accurate description.
I will end off on a positive note. I did enjoy reading about Annelise having a child and her relationships with her friends. I liked Klara's relationship with Ruthie, and it was sad to see them being separated. The family relationships were cute, but that's really the only good thing I have to say.
Content Warning:
There's not too much language - I can't remember anything big. Despite it being a book set during WWII, there's no violence. The only "violent" thing that happens in this book is a brick being thrown through a window. The biggest thing content-wise is romance. The romance plots are not central, but there are a lot of little moments that are described in more detail that I'd like. There are some scenes with characters in bed together and descriptions of intense romantic feelings.
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