Book Review: The Dollmaker of Krakow

The Dollmaker of Krakow by R.M. Romero

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


First, this is most assuredly not "in the vein of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Number the Stars." It's more in the vein of the Magic Tree House book but with less "real" information and much worse dialogue. I like books about dolls coming to life—The Christmas Doll, The Dolls' House, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, for example. I can appreciate fairy tales as a way to present the Holocaust-- Jane Yolen's Briar Rose is superb. But I left this novel thinking, "Huh?" I don't really like to leave bad reviews, especially for debut authors; however, I think this novel sugarcoats (readers of the novel will get that pun) the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust. I'd hate to think about a generation of middle readers growing up reading this instead of The Dairy of a Young Girl, Number the Stars, The Endless Steppe, or Snow Treasure, for example. Not recommended at all.



View all my reviews

Book Review: The Invisible Bridge

Stunning, sweeping, heartbreaking, uplifting: these are the first words that come to mind as I review Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge. This novel is simply brilliant, although there is nothing simple about it.

Based on the author's own family story, The Invisible Bridge begins in 1937 with a young and excited Andras Levi, who is on his way from his home in Budapest to study architecture in Paris. The world is wide open before him. He quickly rises to the top of his class, and he falls in love with an older woman with a mysterious past. The reader gets as wrapped up in Andras and Klara as they are, not realizing the incredible danger that surrounds them. Andras and Klara are Jewish, and the war is about to change their lives forever.

The novel takes Andras from Budapest to Paris, back to Budapest and then to the horrors of labor camps. But I don't want to reveal too much, so let me focus on Orringer as a writer. First, there is the  poetry of her writing, the striking images that I had to read over and over:

"He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the time when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father's orchard."

"The hills east of Buda had come into their young leaves, insensate to the dead and the grieving. The flowering lindens and plane trees seemed almost obscene to Andras, inappropriate, like girls in transparent lawn dresses at a funeral."

And I was constantly amazed by Orringer's attention to detail—to following each story through to its end. Orringer's characters are so vivid, so multidimensional, I could swear I really know them. And what a tremendous amount of research the author has done as far as the WWII itself. Unbelievable.


I'm really quite astounded by The Invisible Bridge. The last 50 pages or so I read in a doctor's office while waiting for a friend, and I embarrassingly wept now and then. I was slightly numb when I closed the book, stunned by human resiliency as displayed in the character but also stunned by Orringer's ability to craft such a novel.

Book Review: The German Woman

Kate Zweig is Paul Griner's The German Woman: British by birth, German by marriage. The novel opens in WWI in Prussia at a field hospital that is about to be obliterated. Kate is a nurse and her husband, Horst, a doctor. They escape to Germany, where their lives become sheer misery, filled with terror, hunger, pain and drudgery.

Griner leaves Kate and Horst in Germany and moves into London in WWII. Claus is an American filmmaker living in London, now a reluctant British spy. His story is confusing, told in muddled bits and pieces that reflect his own confusion about his true identity. Born of an Irish father and German mother, he can't figure out to whom he owes his loyalty.

Then Claus meets Kate, who is by now a woman in her mid-40s, who has recently fled Germany to escape the Nazis. We discover, again in bits and pieces, what happened to Kate and Horst in the years between wars. Claus and Kate embark on a romance that is a refuge for both of them in the midst of their war lives. Claus struggles constantly with his role as a spy and with his desire to have his latest film accepted; Kate continues to work as a nurse, which consists mostly of providing medical assistance to civilians caught in the London bombings. They keep secret from each other portions of their pasts, doling out bits and pieces like shards of the broken city all around them.

Eventually, Claus implodes, egged on by his supervisor. Trained as a spy, he becomes suspicious of everyone, including Kate. But Griner keeps the reader guessing too, wondering if Claus is right about Kate—is she a German spy, or just a woman wounded by war?

Griner is a fantastic writer. The images in the novel are powerful and memorable: a splotch of red raspberries against the gray ash, a piano played to soothe starvation, a pig lounging in the sun. I didn't exactly understand all the espionage jargon. I couldn't quite grasp what, exactly, Claus was doing; but that is my own ignorance on war espionage. I was frustrated at times with not being able to understand this large part of the novel, but the story of Claus and Kate was compelling enough to keep reading even without understanding a lot of the historical context.

(Thanks to Bookworm's Dinner for the original recommendation. Other World War II era novels reviewed here.)

Book Review: When My Name Was Keoko

"If a war lasts long enough, is it possible that people would completely forget the idea of beauty? That they'd only be able to do what they needed to survive and would no longer remember how to make and enjoy beautiful things?"

When My Name Was Keoko is a young adult novel by Linda Sue Park about a Korean family in Japanese-occupied Korea during World War II, told in the alternating voices of 10-year-old Sun-hee and 13-year-old Tae-yul. Korea has long been under Japanese rule when this novel begins, but a new order from the fascist regime seeks to strip them of their last bit of Korean identity: all Koreans must take new Japanese names. Already the people have been forced to give up their cultural symbols, language, and traditions. Sun-hee becomes Keoko and Tae-yul becomes Nobuo, but they remain fiercely Korean in their hearts.

What the siblings suspect and soon realize with both happiness and anxiety is that their beloved Uncle is a leader in the resistance movement. Although they are frightened of the repercussions, Sun-hee and Tae-yul do what they can do help Uncle and eventually Tae-yul risks his life for Korea.

This was a beautiful book. I had trouble sometimes with the alternating voices of Sun-hee and Tae-yul, but that was my own lack of concentration. The chapters are clearly labeled. The story is a powerful one, and I regret that I didn't use this book last year when teaching a literature circle on various experiences in World War II. I highly recommend this not only to the 10-14 year old "suggested reading audience," but to adult readers, as well. There is also a great bibliography at the end that includes several more young adult books about the Korean experience in WW2.