Summer at Gaglow

Rating:
Summary: A touching, brilliant novel
Review: "Summer at Gaglow" is a compelling and poignant story that veers between that final golden summer before World War I and the present. If this book has a flaw it is that the last moments of innocence in August of 1914, filled as they were with sumptuous meals and large-scale entertainments and castle-like houses, are more compelling than the crimped present where money is short and apartments small. Yet Freud almost seamlessly glides between the two time periods. The writing is full of marvelous characters such as the mother's dogs, who follow her everywhere, and the three sisters of 1914, with their strange jealousies and obsessions. I heartily recommend this book as a perfect read for a long, quiet night.

Rating:
Summary: A touching, brilliant novel
Review: "Summer at Gaglow" is a compelling and poignant story that veers between that final golden summer before World War I and the present. If this book has a flaw it is that the last moments of innocence in August of 1914, filled as they were with sumptuous meals and large-scale entertainments and castle-like houses, are more compelling than the crimped present where money is short and apartments small. Yet Freud almost seamlessly glides between the two time periods. The writing is full of marvelous characters such as the mother's dogs, who follow her everywhere, and the three sisters of 1914, with their strange jealousies and obsessions. I heartily recommend this book as a perfect read for a long, quiet night.

Rating:
Summary: Successful use of switching context
Review: I guess i bought this book with expectations of eclecticism, sublime phrasing, depth of expression. I was disappointed on those fronts, but nonetheless enjoyed the book. It flows well. Unlike many novels which switch from one historical period to another, back and forth, this works exceptionally well, with one chapter ending and the reader desiring more. It's definitely an engrossing page turner. Literary? Maybe not. I think I was expecting less-obvious treatment of the family dynamics and character struggles. Some of it is extremely predictable, like the dialogue between the main character, a pregnant single mother, and her best friend Pam, or her ex-lover Mike. The scenes of the father painting her seemed a little too easily extracted from autobiography and I wondered what if anything it added to the development. Those passages were the ones I liked least.

Rating:
Summary: Successful use of switching context
Review: I guess i bought this book with expectations of eclecticism, sublime phrasing, depth of expression. I was disappointed on those fronts, but nonetheless enjoyed the book. It flows well. Unlike many novels which switch from one historical period to another, back and forth, this works exceptionally well, with one chapter ending and the reader desiring more. It's definitely an engrossing page turner. Literary? Maybe not. I think I was expecting less-obvious treatment of the family dynamics and character struggles. Some of it is extremely predictable, like the dialogue between the main character, a pregnant single mother, and her best friend Pam, or her ex-lover Mike. The scenes of the father painting her seemed a little too easily extracted from autobiography and I wondered what if anything it added to the development. Those passages were the ones I liked least.

Rating:
Summary: I loved 50% of this book.
Review: I was very caught up in the story of the Belgard family during the First World War, and would have liked the book to continue on about them, through the inflation, the Hitler years and World War II. I was not at all interested in Sarah and her presenet day family. If the author wanted to introduce the contemporary issue of returning property in the former East Germany to its original owners, she could have put them in the first and last chapters instead of making them half the book. There seems no other point to their existence. Unless you get into the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, there also seems no point in making the characters a Jewish family or emphasizing this. They seem to be Jewish in name only; no religious holidays are ever celebrated, no one goes to the synagogue, the parents were married at the Society of Friends. There are one or two prejudicial remarks made by others, but this book almost trivializes the problems of anti-Semitism in Germany, even before Hitler came to power. So much time is wasted talking about Sarah and her baby and her friends and relatives that serve no purpose that important questions about the other family go unanswered. Why did the governess try to turn the daughters against the mother? Didn't any of these girls ever try to think for themselves? What made the father sink into such a depression without anyone appearing to notice? I think the author couldnt decide which story she wanted to tell and wound up with half of a good story and a lot of meaningless chapters sandwiched in between.

Rating:
Summary: I LOVED THIS BOOK.
Review: Summer at Gaglow made me feel like I was kicked back on a white wicker sofa in a cotton summer dress, with absolutely nothing to do but sink deeply into the beauty of this novel. The interplay between characters was beautifully casted. I became immersed in the characters, dying to know what would happen next--and toward the end, trying to figure out what really happened. Was it like her father said it was? Or her uncle? As the book reaches a conclusion, the narrations from past and present contradict one another, and it's up to you to think and ponder what is really going on. I absolutely loved it.

The use of the English language was also very well done, with phrases such as "she beached herself up on the couch" used intelligently, so she never said "so-and-so was fat." Her description was incredible--I could picture everything she said.

Rating:
Summary: It could have been great but. . .
Review: This had the potential of being an exceptional novel but it never quite makes it. The contemporary story of Sarah is thin and cliched compared to the richness of the story of the Belgards in Germany. I found myself not caring what happened to Sarah except as her life related to her grandmother--and there wasn't much of that. That is, perhaps, the biggest problem with the contemporary scenes: the characters are all treated superficially, especially in comparison to the WWI-era chapters.The idea (at least I think this was the point--it's not too clear) that one can never truly know what really happened, in the lives of our parents, grandparents,and other relatives, before we knew them, is very interesting and certainly worthy of exploration, but it's treatment falls flat here. At the end of the book, my reaction was "Oh, well".