Author: Sande Boritz Berger
Publisher: She Writes Press
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
I don't see any value to recommendations in the front of an ebook. In the print version they may sway a potential reader leafing through the pages in a book store. They would not sway me because I don't know any of those people, so their opinion carries no weight, especially since nearly all of them appear to originate from within the author's own community.
All they did was to make me wonder why they could find no one outside of that community to recommend this, or even if they actually asked - and if not, then why not? To put these in an ebook strikes me as ridiculous, because no one leafs-through an ebook. It's not even possible until you actually buy it! By then, of course, you already have the ebook in your possession, presumably because you already decided to read it, so what, exactly, is the point of these very limited recommendations? I don't know! I do find it curious, though. I think it's a symptom of the fact that print publishers have not actually begun to properly grasp the possibilities and the implications of the electronic book universe.
Set in World War Two, this novel follows the lives of two girls, Rosha in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius, and Mira in New York City, USA, who are cousins separated not only by the Atlantic ocean, but by a whole lifestyle. Mira is trying to break into the fashion business, whereas Rosha is in a country where the value of life is rapidly going out of fashion, especially if you're Jewish, Romany, gay, or otherwise classified as a person of vilification by the Nazis.
I think it might have been easier to enjoy this had I not recently read the real thing, Bedtime stories, and events from the Rear Case described by Anne Frank, which for me, I admit, set a standard that's going to be hard for anyone to surpass. I simply could not get into this novel no matter how hard I tried. It did not draw me in, nor did it engross me or make me want to turn pages. I could not find any compelling reason to pursue the story. I did not find myself interested in the characters.
In the interests of full disclosure, let me confess right here that I have no more respect for the fashion industry and those in it than I do for the cosmetics industry. I really don't. Both businesses are a grotesque insult to, and an abuse of women. I find them shallow, self-centered and petty, so Mira's story was pretty much a non-starter for me!
I could have become interested in her had there been something to spark such an interest, but there was not. Indeed, I found it very shallow, if not callous of her to be pursuing her petty interests safe in NYC, when her family in Europe was in such grave danger. Rosha's story was much more interesting, but even there, it was nothing new. I've read her story many times before, and there was nothing about this one to captivate me.
First of all, unlike with Anne Frank's case, this is fiction, and even though it has roots in reality, for me it needs to offer a lot more than just being another retreaded World War Two tragedy/drama if it's going to garner for itself any traction. When reading a story like this I have to ask: why was it written? What is its purpose? Was it because the story in question, over all others, has something new and original to impart to us? Or was it simply written because stories of this nature so readily sway a certain readership, and often garner awards for themselves not necessarily for any literary merit, but because of their very nature alone?
Yes, those events in Nazi Germany were awful almost beyond imagination and credibility, yet they were nonetheless true. The problem is that whilst it's easy to say that we must never forget, and never allow that to happen again, everywhere we look in the modern world, genocide does still happen: in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in the Sudan.
Unless you have a really original and striking story to relate - something which offers us a different category of interest than that which has been offered before (which IMO this novel does not), then it seems to me that it's quite wrong to continue to demand that we focus on the events of a half-century ago when there are much more recent, just as horrible tragedies which are in serious danger of being all-too-quickly forgotten. It seems to me that writers do the memory of those people from World War Two just as much a disservice as they do modern victims of equally horrible pogroms, by pouring out so many fictional accounts which offer nothing that's not already been trampled well down to the level of the insipid and the mediocre by scores of other heedless and ill-placed feet.
We must never forget, of course, what happened back then, but the saying remains true, that familiarity breeds contempt. So I have to ask: how easy is it for people to let their eyes slide away unseeing when presented with this plethora of stories focused on essentially the same thing? How much does it simply inure us against feeling anything for those real victims, to have fictional stories routinely trotted-out like a troupe of circus ponies? Does it not make more sense to for us to remember them by being keenly aware of the fact that whilst those people are lost to us forever, the mentality which hurt them so badly has not been lost? It's today's horrors upon which we must focus if we're to truly honor they who died the same way, albeit more than half a century ago.
It is for these reasons that I cannot recommend this novel.
