by Jenna Blum
Libby 731 pages
Published: 2005
Genre: historical fiction, relationships
Libby said the book was 775 pages, so when I got to the acknowledgements on page 732, I thought, "Where's the rest of the story?!" The last forty pages were a preview of another book. I wanted more resolution! I wanted another conversation between Trudy and Anna!
This was a really, really hard book for me. It went between the 1990s in Minnesota (Trudy focus) and 1940s Germany (Anna focus). There were a lot of really graphic and difficult parts to read. There was a lot of sex, violence, cruelty, evil . . . not a surprise for Nazi Germany.
"For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald.
Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life."
I actually don't think that blurb really describes the essence of the book. Anna's choices have definitely impacted Trudy's life, but the photograph doesn't even come to Trudy until she puts Anna in a nursing home. There is so much pain in their relationship and Trudy's vague memories of her early life in Germany are like hauntings. Also, she barely starts to get at Anna's truth until the very end of the book! There's so much more about Max, Anna's father, the liberation of Buchenwald, Mathilde's death, . . .
This book was well-written, but hard to read at times. I checked it out because of how much I enjoyed her book Woodrow on the Bench. Blum is a talented writer.
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