My thoughts
This is a debut novel and the author did a pretty good job of bringing me in and keeping me interested. At least the historical part.
Told in two timelines, 2015 and 1941. Stella a college professor and Hildegard who was a maid during the reign of terror from Hitler.
I was not impressed with Stella at all. She seemed to be a very immature person. And that she was a professor was even more unbelievable that her maturity. She's stalking a fellow professor? Yes he was a jerk. Yes he might be a horrible man. But Stella is suppose to be an educated person. She has her share of misfortunes with men it seems. I just didn't like her.
Hildegard was a very likable woman. You meet her after the fact, in 2015. She meets Stella and starts telling her about when she worked as a maid. How she and her new husband were helping Jews escape. How she started helping the resistance try to overthrow the Nazis. This part of the story was fascinating. What all happened and why it happened will hold your attention.
I did not exactly get the link to the two women, Stella and Hildegard, but may have missed something. Maybe the sexism. Maybe something else. This book is very good. It was a bit slow starting out for me but it wrapped up quite nicely and was a very enjoyable read.
If you like historical and perhaps metoo movement stories this is the one for you. It was a good book. The author did a good job of bringing everything together. Some got what they deserved for being such jerks. I eventually kind of liked Stella's husband Peter. He started out a bit of a jerk by the way.
I gave this one FOUR stars and recommend it. You will enjoy it.
Synopsis
2015. Stella, a professor and historian, comes to the beautiful and ancient city of Bonn, Germany, for a World Heritage conference. With things at home tearing at the seams, she is determined to pretend all is well. After she is assaulted over a trivial matter by another delegate, Stella descends into a shadowy observer, slowly becoming an obsessed stalker. When she meets the elderly Hildegard on a park bench by the River Rhine she is drawn into her wartime story, little seeing the similarities to her own situation.
1941. Hildegard, new wife to Kurt and student of architecture, surrenders to the inevitable; she needs a job for them to pay their rent. Interviewing for a hotel post, she does not realize her life now is off course, running on a track destined to collide with the sinister Fuhrer himself. She is thrust into the role of maid to Hitler and is no longer able to hide away from reality in her studies. Moving forward is the only option, no matter how dark it gets.
With the story switching between 2015 and 1941, Stella and Hildegard face questions of survival, identity, love and meaning as they juggle moral ambiguities in a world of elusive justice.
Author bio
Jennifer Harris writes literary fiction inspired by the historic environment—not historical fiction, but fiction set in the contemporary era that responds to the past, remembered either publicly in monuments and memorials, or in subtle, private ways. Her PhD is in Cultural Heritage theory and she has lectured in and researched cultural heritage and museums for many years. She has also run a small museum, and worked as a journalist in Australia and London.
Jennifer is from Western Australia and has lived also in France and the UK. In 2020 she relocated to Seattle in the spectacular Pacific Northwest of the USA.
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