The World That We Knew
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL On the brink of World War II, with the Nazis tightening their grip on Berlin, a mother’s act of courage and love offers her daughter a chance of survival. “[A] hymn to the power of resistance, perseverance, and enduring love in dark times…gravely beautiful…Hoffman the storyteller continues to dazzle.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW At the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her twelve-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime. Her desperation leads her to Ettie, the daughter of a rabbi whose years spent eavesdropping on her father enables her to create a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Hanni’s daughter, Lea. Once Ava is brought to life, she and Lea and Ettie become eternally entwined, their paths fated to cross, their fortunes linked. What does it mean to lose your mother? How much can one person sacrifice for love? In a world where evil can be found at every turn, we meet remarkable characters that take us on a stunning journey of loss and resistance, the fantastical and the mortal, in a place where all roads lead past the Angel of Death and love is never-ending.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is one of those multi-character narratives where I sometimes lose track of who's who but its beautiful and made me both sad and filled with hope about humanity.
Highly recommended for everyone but small childeen.
This is my last Alice Hoffman book. I love her plots and ideas - and this one sounded so promising. But I failed to connect with the characters again. I think it's the writing style that always keeps me at a distance.
To be fair, when your exemplar of the form is All the Light we Cannot See, everything else suffers by comparison. It's clear this book is well loved and honestly, the hand-sell is pretty solid. WWII drama focused on three young girls struggling to survive and finding hope with the help of a bit of magical realism.
And yet.
Death and danger abound but it felt perfunctory. I felt no stakes even as the roster of characters is slowly whittled down.
These kids are just so remarkable. Julien is a math prodigy and an adept teacher. Victor a natural explosives expert with the French Resistance. Etti of course is nothing short of a full blown wizard able to conjure life itself. And Lea is in possession of a monstrously strong golem who spends most of the time making bread and dancing with a heron. Why are these two on the run again?
These trappings are more suited to a YA fantasy set in a some dire, post-apocalyptic world instead of trying to balance these fantastical elements against the real-world backdrop of Nazism. A bit of a swing and a miss for me.
Thrilling and devastating in equal measure. This is such an interesting and deeply-situated take on the story of the golem, which I loved. I loved how deeply Jewish this novel is, which seems like an obvious thing to say, but I find a lot of Holocaust fiction is sort of divorced from Jewish culture and faith because it is interested in the horrors and violence of the Shoah, and I think Hoffman did a great job of writing a Jewish magical realism novel set during the Holocaust, rather than a Holocaust novel that happens to be magical realist.
