Tyler Kieft

I can appreciate why this is a classic, but I really despised reading it. Not my style and not my humor, that's for sure. Feels like something that's been taken out of context in the present day. Repetitive, too many characters which all blend together, and often feeling like it was written by an amateur writer, with too many thesaurus-derived adjectives thrown in. However, at certain points, I enjoyed it, and even thought, wow, this is genius. 4 stars, but I hope I never have to read it again.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to review this one right after I read it, so it's a bit cloudy at this point.

I really liked this book. The pacing is slow and deliberate, which didn't put me off. I was a little annoyed by the medieval-style language, particularly the main character's use of the word “princess” to address his wife over...and over...and over.

But otherwise, I have a lot of praise. The ending was haunting: a slow, emotional climax of melancholy rather than action.

I suspect I'll remember the meditations in here for a while: the meaning and usefulness of memory, of forgetting, and the possible futility of both in the face of certain death for us all.

For how gripping and fast-paced “Devil in the White City” was, this book was a struggle to get through. Such an interesting time in history - the rise of Hitler, Nazism, and the Third Reich - seen through an incredibly boring lens. I applaud Erik Larson for his ambition in writing this book - it is obviously exhaustingly researched, and the perspective is unique - but at the end it kind of fell flat for me.

The main reason for the book's failure is that he tried to base it too much on his protagonists - the American ambassador in Germany in the early 1930's, and his daughter. He did this, presumably, because he had a ton of source material from them - they both kept a journal, and in addition he had the ambassador's personal and government communication. We learn almost nothing about the ambassador's wife or son, since they did not keep detailed records of their time in Germany.

Both the ambassador and his daughter are weak characters. He's just not that interesting - a “quiet scholar” type, ridiculed within the foreign service establishment, and she is quite naive, interested in mostly keeping up romantic liasons in the city. Indeed, much of the book is devoted to detailing these romantic exploits, which gets tedious to read after a while. Yes - she was involved with prominent political and government figures, but these sections of the book read like a childish diary. Also, the combination of writing about both at the same time doesn't make too much sense - at times it felt like I was reading two different novels. (But this is a tactic Larson likes to use, as you would know if you read “Devil in the White City”).

The tedium of reading this book was also due to the overabundance of minor characters mentioned as part of the story. Couldn't Larson have edited some of these people out? Surely it doesn't make sense to mention - every - single - person - the family came in contact with.

There were parts of the book that were very interesting, and it was definitely a perspective on Nazi Germany that I had never encountered, but ultimately the book was crushed by its own weight.

Super engaging book, couldn't put it down, but the writing is awwwwful

What an ending! A cliffhanger for the next installment, without being too dramatic or cheesy.

I liked this book more and more as it went on, but I still had trouble understanding why it got the praise that it did. The writing was so clinical and detached, I felt almost nothing while reading and I thought the translation was awkward and poor. Secondary and tertiary characters failed to become real to me, they were all just a procession of names, very few who retained any uniqueness to their personalities in my mind. The lack of large-scale structure to the book made it feel like it was just the same story over and over, conflict, then reuniting, and the different scenes all blended together.

I think I liked the last 100 pages or so because the plot (if you could call it that) became more linear, but also because it was so easy to identify the flawed adolescent reasoning behind many of Elena's bad decisions, whereas I found it tougher to understand and criticize the narrator's younger self, as it was more abstract to me.

I also wonder how much of this I didn't identify with because I'm a man? Wish I had gotten to go to the book club for this to hear everyone's thoughts :/