Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The German Girl is really a story about two girls; one, Hannah, a 12 year-old living in 1939 Berlin, the other, Anna, a 12 year-old living in 2014 New York City. Anna has never known her father, who was killed in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. So when she receives a package of old family photographs from her great-aunt Hannah, whom she’s never met, she and her mother decide to travel to Cuba where Hannah lives and investigate Anna’s father’s life. There, Anna learns of Hannah’s experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, travelling on the ship St. Louis. The vast majority of the passengers on the St. Louis were Jewish Germans, and they were refused entry in Cuba, the United States, and Canada. Unfortunately, this book is so frustrating, because there is no emotional power to it. None. And with a subject as inherently emotional as the Holocaust, that’s disappointing. It’s not an unreadable book, but it’s unsatisfying. The writing is decent, but it is quite often inconsistent (there are frequent occurrences of the narrator expressing one thing and two sentences later, expressing the exact opposite). The biggest problem with this book is the characters. I’m not of the opinion that characters have to be likeable, but they do have to be interesting, and they do have to be developed, especially in a character-driven novel as this one is. All the characters in The German Girl are superficially developed and often strain credibility. I couldn’t care about any of them, because I couldn’t understand any of them, because I couldn’t KNOW any of them. A few examples… I didn’t understand why Alma, Hannah’s mother, felt such anger toward Cuba and nothing at all about Germany, the country that expelled her. For that matter, neither did Hannah, and that strikes me as just so odd. It’s like their expulsion only impacted them in terms of inconvenience – there was never any sense that this family was being ripped from their home. I didn’t understand why both Alma and Hannah both simply wallowed, and that makes me angry that they wallowed. Perhaps had I understood their reasoning, I would have felt more compassion for them. The “love story” between Hannah and her friend Leo. There is no romantic chemistry between the two, and why should there be? They’re 12 when this “epic love” supposedly blossoms. Their “love” was all told to the reader, not shown at all (which is true of the entire book, actually), and so not only does the relationship fall flat, it makes no sense to me that at the end, Leo is who Hannah thinks of. I just don’t buy “true love”, because I was never allowed to actually SEE Hannah’s heart. Toward the end of the book, Hannah talks a lot about the “guilt of the Rosenthals (her family)”. Well…there was no set up for this. It only came up at the end of the book, and there were never any indications that Hannah or Alma felt any sort of misplaced guilt about being Jewish, or surviving the trip on the St. Louis, surviving in Cuba…I really have no idea what guilt their family suffers from. Because, again, I was held so far away from the characters that even if guilt was implied, I couldn’t reach it. And in my view, this is all a problem that results directly from the structure and mechanics of the book. There’s a an idiom in writing – “show don’t tell”. And it’s good advice for a very good reason – showing a character by having them act, and feel, gives a deeper, more complete picture of a character than simply telling the reader that “Hannah did this, and Alma did that.” The author essentially wrote a series of summaries of events, interspersed every so often with live-action scenes. One example is a scene where Hannah apparently has an argument with her brother. Rather than showing the reader the argument, and perhaps revealing character of both, the author simply tells us “Though he raised his voice, I responded in a whisper.” Well, that’s vague. And there are so many scenes like this. I also found the parallelism of Hannah and Anna to be so heavy-handed as to be irritating. It was done to force a connection between the two rather than organically developing one. So, with some guilt because it’s hard to criticize Holocaust stories, I have to say The German Girl was a tremendous let down. Too much distance and shallow treatment for a topic that deserves depth and richness.