Book Review Rating ♥♥
The author’s reasons for writing the book are understandable and
admirable. At the centre of the book is a great idea waiting to be written. But
this is not that book. I’m afraid to say that the writing of the book is poorly
executed.
I hate to write anything bad about a laudable attempt to write a book
on the subject of her families’ experiences during the German occupation of the
Netherlands during the Second World War. However, I always believe in writing
an honest review.
I will start with the poetry. It is of a freeform style that is both
turgid and generic. It adds nothing to the book’s worth. In fact it is a
distraction from the stories told within the book.
The stories are rather leaden, clichéd and are in need of a good
editor. The book is grammatically and artistically poor as is the book’s style
of writing. The use of language, analogies and phraseology is at times puzzling
and unwieldy.
When the author writes of her mother’s memories of the war she states that,
“these are terrifying memories…she (the author’s mother) has blocked them out.
However, within the same paragraph the author describes the above as “like the
sting of pulling off a well stuck band Aid”.
Later when the writer is talking to her mother on the phone she writes,
“And I hear a smile come down the line”. How does one ‘hear’ a smile? Don’t get
me started on the author’s misuse of conjunctions at the beginning of a
sentence that are scattered through the book.
The author also strangely misuses phrases that result in a sentence
making no sense, “It’s like you’re in a vacuum, the time –space continuum
interrupted, a chunk that’s forever out of reach. The time-space continuum is a
mathematical model. It is the joining of three dimensional space with one
dimensional time.
The author then mentions on the next page when talking of “travelling
is lonely. Like you’ve lost the connection with what you know and love” that
“There’s no frame of reference”. But of course there is a frame of reference.
I’m sure the author has travelled before or been lonely before or felt lost
before etc. All these would be within her ‘frame of reference’.
Apart from the misuse and inaccurate use of the above terms (and there
are many more) the main problem is that they act as a distraction. The
incongruous phrases also devalue the aesthetic quality of the story.
Sadly, there are many problems with the book and these also include
inaccurate information. Firstly, the author states that her mother as a little
girl talks to an ordinary German Soldier dressed in black. Lower ranked army
German soldiers dressed in a greenish-grey uniform. The author also has her
Dutch antecedents referring to the Germans as ‘Jerries’. This was a slang term
for the Germans used by the British. The people of the Netherlands would have
referred to the Germans as either ‘Mofs’ or Poeps’.
I was also surprised by the lack of planning the author made when
visiting the Netherlands as research for her book. She writes as if she simply
wandered around aimlessly with no planned itinerary. For example, she writes,
“(I) stumble upon the Netherlands Institute for War.” Surely as a journalist
visiting the country she is planning to write about should have a planned
itinerary rather than just ‘stumbling’ around.
There is a seed of an interesting story buried within the book but has
been halted from growing into a fully formed mature idea by poor, stiff,
awkward writing.
Number of Pages - 110
Sex Scenes - None
Profanity - None
Genre - Biographical
This review was based on an advanced copy via Netgalley.com
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