Rating: 5/5
Review:
Thoughtful and involving
I liked this book very much. It is a well written, involving and very believable story of Elise, a well-to-do teenage Jewish girl from Vienna arriving as a refugee in Dorset in 1938 to work as a domestic servant, hoping that her parents would also be able to escape the persecution soon. Narrated in the first person, it follows both her life as she adjusts to her new circumstances and her emotional life as a refugee cut off from news of her family. I thought it was extremely well done: I found the characters very well drawn with Elise's internal life particularly believable and insightful, and I became very involved in her story. I laughed several times, found other moments piercingly moving and thought Natasha Solomons showed a real empathy with and understanding of the situation of a refugee far from her home and family.
Solomons (as she did in her first novel, Mr. Rosenblum's List) uses a lot of descriptions of the Dorset countryside and its changes with the seasons as a context for the story. I really liked this and it is done extremely well, as is the developing love story. Not everyone will like these aspects of the book, and it is not hard to guess what is going to happen at times - sometimes quite deliberately on the author's part. If these are things you dislike in a book then this won't be for you, but otherwise I recommend it very warmly as a very readable, insightful and rewarding book.
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