My Rating: 2 stars
This is a difficult review for me to write, as I really wanted to like this book, but there were just too many things wrong with it, to the point that the negatives ended up outweighing the few positives. I was initially drawn to this book because of the premise and also the genre of historical fiction being one of my favorites. The first chapter actually started off okay, but unfortunately, the more I read, the more I found it difficult to get into the story – my attention would start to wander and next thing I knew, I was skimming pages rather than actually reading.
The biggest problem I had with the story was its structure. Going into this, I was expecting an alternating timeline between wartime Paris and 1950s New York as mentioned in the premise. I'm fine with alternating timelines, as I read a lot of historical fiction and am used to seeing that with the genre. Usually, with dual timelines, there is an identifier that clearly differentiates the past from the present – be it separate chapters with the timeframe indicated at the start, or, if within the same chapter, a marker of some sort or even a transition sentence or two. For some reason, none of that existed in this book, at least not in the copy I received. There was no clear delineation whatsoever between the two timelines, no transition or anything – each chapter seemed to start in the present, but then a few paragraphs in, it would seemingly jump to the past and then later jump back to the present. For example – there would be a scene where the main character Charlotte is talking to her daughter Vivi, who is 14 years old in the present (1950s New York), about something, then in the next paragraph, Vivi is described as being asleep in the back room of a store while there is some drama going on in the front room...it took me a bit to realize that paragraph was actually describing something that occurred 10 years ago when Charlotte was still in Paris and Vivi was only 4 years old. There was no transition sentence or even a few words to indicate that Charlotte was thinking of a past memory – in fact, the entire sequence would be written in the same present tense voice, which made it feel like everything was happening in the same timeline when they obviously weren't. This made the story very confusing and extremely hard to follow. Not only that, it also made it hard for me to connect with any of the characters, as I was too distracted trying to sort out the timelines and ended up not paying as much attention to what was happening with the characters.
Speaking of the characters....as if the timeline thing wasn't confusing enough, the way some of the characters were written was a bit all over the place. There were some sections where a character would be referred to by their first name, but had not been introduced or mentioned previously, making it feel like the character was randomly dropped into the story without explanation of who they were – a few times I actually had to go back and re-read previous sections to see if I may have missed something. Interestingly enough, there were also some sections where the opposite occurred – there would be paragraph upon paragraph describing someone doing something or interacting with someone else, but the entire time, only the gender pronoun (he or she) would be used and no name would be mentioned.
I also had an issue with the way the historical elements were incorporated into the story. In some of the chapters, a historical situation would be brought up and the description of it would go on for pages and pages, sometimes to the point that it felt disconnected from the rest of the plot. Basically, the historical elements didn't blend well into the story, which made me feel at times that I was reading a fictional story with random history lessons haphazardly inserted in places where it didn't make sense. But then in other sections, there would be no historical element at all, just some soap opera-ish drama and/or back-and-forth dialogue between some of the characters.
Overall, this book was a chore to read, as the serious flaws with the execution made it mostly not work for me. Unfortunately, the basic structural issues were too overwhelming and therefore hard for me to ignore, which is a shame, as I felt the story did have potential. With that said, I'm a bit of an outlier here, since there are plenty of positive reviews for this book, so I would suggest checking those out as well for a more balanced perspective.
Received ARC from St. Martin's Griffin via Edelweiss.
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