The work is based on two true stories or rather facts, one in Paris of a grand demimondaine whose fantastic apartment came to light just before this was written, and another about a picture of a castle in Germany that related to past of a friend of the author.
This work could have been good, if only it did not try to keep the mid path skirting a light romance or rather two of them, an evocative journey, and a dive into a traumatic past, a past that was horrendous as hell for the world and a dive that is barely dipping toes out of a luxury yacht into a broiling ocean, that too in a safe space anchored in the yacht in a lounging chair by the swimming pool. As it is treads a border of what was disdainfully named mills and boon once and is now far more horribly called chic lit.
The tale alternates between two young women, one in 1934 in Paris who is taken to Geneva for a lake shore vacation by her demimondaine grandmother because in Paris the girl is unlikely to find a beau whose family will accept her, due to the grandma's past. The other is living in San Franisco in 2010, and it was her now 94 grandfather who was the beau the first young woman met in the hotel on lake shore and fell in love deeply with, mutually as it happened. Only, the young man was scion to a wealthy Prussian family, and was pressured to join his nation's new movement, which he was uncertain about.
Events unfold on both ends of the time as story alternates quick betwen the two time points, leaving the reader dizzy, trying to catch up which woman one is now proceeding with the story of. One is wondering if one young woman was related to the other, or to the young man she met in 2010. Until one is given a rather unsatisfactory out of wondering.
Unsatisfactory, because while the first story is about a very traumatic era, it skirts it with peeps out of the chocolate castle window that are no more than a word here or another there, and finally after finishing the book one is left with the impression the book was meant to indicate that the horrors of the time were not limited to the holocaust victims, but included those counted amongst the perpetrators or ones sitting on sides watching, approving or not. And while that contention is not fundamentally untrue, this pastry and chocolate platter can hardly give a picture of the reality of the horrors suffered by most people on either side.
Then again, perhaps it was an assignment in college that the advisor thought was worth publishing.
