Dead Wake

Dead Wake

The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

★★★★☆

Whoa, what a ride! Larson’s fourth book is a doozy. After reading but not loving his last work, In the Garden of the Beasts, I was nervous about this one. It more than exceeded my expectations! Larson has a talent for pairing his meticulous research with compelling stories and salacious details. The tale of the Lusitania was ripe for the telling and he timed it perfectly with the 100 anniversary of the sinking.

The author made the voyage and disaster come alive by choosing a few individuals to focus on. We followed them through their entire journey. We see them board, learned their background and the reason why they were traveling. We knew who was waiting for them at home and then we watched the inevitable unfold.

We also learned about the Lusitania’s captain (Turner) and the captain of the U-boat that brought their destruction. Larson took us all the way through the sinking and into the aftermath. We learned who lived and died and what happened in the years that followed. Structuring the book this way put a few faces onto the historical event. It gave the book a depth of emotion that would have been missing if he’d only focused on factual details instead of personal details too. By the time we reach the critical moment you are so invested in the characters that you’ve met that the suspense is palpable.

In the opening chapters we’re introduced to Theodate Pope, a female architect and suffragette, Dwight Harris who carried both an engagement ring and custom life belt on board the ship. Then there was a Vanderbilt who had narrowly missed sailing on the Titanic. There was also a bookseller named Lauriat, carrying a priceless copy of A Christmas Carol that Dickens himself had owned!

A few interesting tidbits:

- Georg von Trapp (he of The Sound of Music fame) was an Austrian U-boat commander and torpedoed a French cruiser, killing 684 sailors!

- Captain Turner testified in the Titanic trial to determine who should receive compensation for their losses. 

- There was a Confederate submarine during the Civil War and three crews were killed just trying to get it to work.

- During WWII the Russians managed to get three copies of the German code book and gave one of them to the British

BOTTOM LINE: Just fantastic. Some nonfiction authors have a hard time restraining themselves from telling readers EVERY single detail that they discovered about a subject. But the best ones leave you fascinated with the subject and even wanting to know more about it. Erik Larson is one of the best and this particular book was a great example of his skill combining with an enthralling story. 

"When Death is as close as he was then, the sharp agony of fear is not there; the thing is too overwhelming and stunning for that." – One of the survivors.

*I received a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Image from here.

Pairing Books with Movies: The Night Watch

The Night Watch 

by Sarah Waters 

★★★ 

This is my fourth Waters novel, but it deviated in a lot of ways from what I've come to expect from her books. There's no vibe of gothic mystery, instead it's more historical fiction. Set in London during World War II, the story follows four main characters, Kay, Helen, Viv and Duncan. Like the other three Waters novels that I’ve read, it’s extremely well written. The setting is beautifully described; the characters are well-drawn, etc., but my problem with this book lay in the plotting and structure. 

We start after the war is done and everyone settled back into their lives in 1947. We meet our main characters and they constantly make vague references to things that happened during the war. Later we travel back to 1944 when the city was being bombed to bits by the Germans. Kay is an ambulance driver and rescues people after their homes are bombed. These scenes were some of my favorite in the book. You could feel the fear and smell the smoke as London fell into ruin around its loyal citizens. 

Kay’s girlfriend Helen is a less interesting character and one that seems indecisive about what she wants from life. Then there’s Viv, a bright young woman who has gotten caught up in a relationship with a married man named Reggie. The final character is Duncan, a young man serving time in prison. We rotate between the lives of each character, learning tiny bits about how they got where they are, but there are always unanswered questions. 

The story moves slowly at first and it took me a while to get into it. The author leaves us intentionally in the dark on quite a few things that she mentions in the first portion of the book. As the novel progresses things are slowly revealed. You supposed to hang in there and trust that it will all be explained, but in the end I never felt like I got the whole story. 

By structuring the book in reverse chronological order you remove a huge amount of suspense. When we move back to 1944 and then to 1941 at the very end, we already know who lives and dies and who ends up together. There are obviously pros and cons to this unique method or storytelling, but it does take the suspense out of certain events. 

**SPOILERS** 

A few of my issues with the book… 

At the end we find out that Helen was already almost killed in a bomb blast. If that’s true, why on earth would she refuse to go to the shelter during future bombings? I would think that she would be the first one in the shelter the second the alarm sounded! 

Also, Duncan and his friend took suicide ridiculously nonchalantly. It really bothered me that only one of the boys wanted to kill himself it took him about 30 seconds to convince Duncan to join his suicide pact. It was like a big game to them and I can't imagine two teenage boys saying, “What do you want to do this today? I don't know let's kill ourselves. Ok, sounds great!” Also, did I miss something, where it’s explained why Duncan decided to move in with Mr. Mundy? 

Viv’s story made a little bit more sense when you see how she met Reggie, except she knew from the get-go that he was on leave to go see his wife and their new baby. My real problem with her wasn't even how they met. What I didn’t get was their ending. He abandons her when she’s in the middle of a medical emergency and about to die. And yet we see in their 1947 section that they are still together with no explanation. That made no sense to me. 

**SPOILERS OVER** 

BOTTOM LINE: I think the story really lost something in the structure. The writing is gorgeous and I particularly love learning more about this time period, but it was almost like reading the ending of a book and then trying to go back and start from the beginning. Not my favorite Waters novel. 

** I do want to say that the audiobook version was fantastic. It was read by Juanita McMahon and she was just excellent! 

Pairing Books With Movies: I saw “The Imitation Game” the day after I finished The Night Watch and I couldn’t believe how perfectly the two aligned. Both focus on London during World War II. Both deal with how homosexuality was viewed during the 1940s. I absolutely LOVED the movie and can’t say enough about it. It was wonderfully done and I would highly recommend it. 

A bonus recommendation, if you aren’t already watching The Bletchley Circle you should be! The first two seasons of the BBC show is available on Netflix. It’s about a group of women who were code breakers during WWII in London.

The Madonnas of Leningrad

The Madonnas of Leningrad

by Debra Dean

★★★☆

Marina works at the Hermitage in Leningrad during World War II. Her fiancé Dmitri leaves to fight at the front in the war, while Marina is trapped in the Russian city during the Siege of Leningrad. She and her aunt and uncle must move into the Hermitage (the art museum seen above) with dozens of others. They are all staving to death, trying only to survive.

The secondary plot deals with Dmitri and Marina’s adult daughter Helen and her struggle with her parents’ declining health. Marina has Alzheimer’s and as she looses her recent memories, those long buried memories from the war come to the surface. The combination of the war story and modern day disconnect between children and their parents works well. Immigrants who survived horrific events during the war don’t often want to rehash their heartbreak, but their children may not understand how their current actions have been formed by their past experiences if they never share them.

I felt like the book was a bit short. There are so many more details that could have been included. I loved learning about the real events that happened during the siege. It’s a fictional story, but the author did some excellent research. I had no idea about this whole part of WWII and I’m still curious about it.

BOTTOM LINE: A short but powerful story of the Siege of Leningrad. Read it if you are interested in learning more about WWII in Russia.

"Hunger has eaten away the veneer of civilization, and people are not themselves."

"Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twining so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her."

Sarah’s Key

Sarah’s Key
by Taiana De Rosnay
★★★

During World War II, the French police in Paris rounded up thousands of Jews and sent them to a Parisian stadium, the Velodrome d'Hiver, where they were held until being sent to Auschwitz for extermination.

This horrific event in history is one that I’d never heard of before reading this book and for that reason alone, I’m glad I read it. The story is written from two points of view. There’s Julia, the present day journalist researching the event, then there is a young girl, Sarah, who experiences the roundup as it happens. We flash back and forth between the two as the story unfolds.

The historical aspect of the plot was fascinating, but I didn’t like the modern day parts. The main character is married to a man that she continuously makes excuses for while he treats her horribly. It’s hard to embrace a character who puts up with someone like that.

The author decided to pair the issue of the Jews extermination in the 1940s with the modern day issue of abortion. I was definitely not expecting that and I felt like it unnecessarily complicated the plot. It’s not that abortion isn’t an important issue, it just felt like a very forced element in the story.

I was really disappointed with this book because there was so much potential. I felt like the emphasis was placed on the wrong things. There was an opportunity for a truly powerful story, but the author ignored it in lieu of talking about Julia’s personal drama. I’m still glad I read it, but in the end it just made me want to learn more about the Vel’ d'Hiv roundup.

Here’s more info on the actual event.