★★★☆☆ Dickensian story of an American girl trapped in Germany

Queen of the Bremen

Marlies Adams DiFante, Ann Marie DiFante

I received Queen of the Bremen: The True Story Of An American Child Trapped In Germany During World War II as a Christmas present from my nephew. I suppose he must have gotten it in a used book store somewhere. It's a self-published memoire of an American woman, Marlies Adams DiFante (recorded by her daughter-in-law Ann Marie DiFante) telling the story of how she was trapped in Germany with her family for seven years during World War II. Her father, John Adams, emigrated from Germany to the USA, where he started a family and became a citizen. In 1939 his wife (also German-American) received a letter informing her that her father was dying. John Adams obeyed the summons to his wife's father's deathbed -- taking his son, Peter, and daughter, Marlies, (six and five years old) and his pregnant wife to Germany. It was terrible timing. Hitler had recently come to power. He invaded Poland, starting World War II. Germany closed its ports, trapping the Adams family in Germany for the duration of the war.

It was terribly difficult. Not being German citizens, the Adams family received even less than the starvation rations German families got. Allied bombers meanwhile reduced every German town to rubble, including the one in which the Adams's lived, with much loss of civilian life.

Rationing difficulties forced the Adams family to separate for a time. Marlies went to live with her Aunt Lena. Lena was a Nazi informer who wanted Marlies only for the sake of her ration tickets. She abused Marlies -- this part of the story is difficult to read. It will remind readers of the privations suffered by the boys of Charles Dickens's novels. Indeed, it made me realize that, bitter and painful as the sufferings of the heroes of Dickens novels are, they are sanitized.

It's not a gentle story. The pain of the story is lessened by the reader's knowledge that Marlies Adams survived to write this memoire. Even when the Allies reached Germany, the sufferings of the Adams family were not ended. If you like to think of the troops who fought the Nazis as Good Guys, this memoire will give you some hard moments.

It will be fairly obvious to any experienced reader that no one involved in the production of this book was a professional. Marlies Adams DiFante and Ann Marie DiFante are not Dickens, and you will quickly realize that the text has never passed through the hands of a professional copy editor. (Grammatical errors are minor, and never affect comprehension.) Still, this authentic memoire showed me sides of the war I had never read elsewhere.

Queen of the Bremen on Amazon

Goodreads review

Comments

★★☆☆☆ Death and What Comes Next is the thing it mocks

Death and What Comes Next Terry Pratchett Death and What Comes Next is a short story (which you can read for free here ) in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld . It is a conversation between Death (a character well known to Discworld readers) and a recently deceased philosopher. The philosopher spews a lot of vapid sophistry in which he argues that he might NOT be dead -- the word quantum is involved. Death responds with equal vapidity. Death has the last word, because... Duh... Usually, even in the worst Discworld production, you can rely on some Pratchett verbal fireworks to make it amusing. I am sorry to say that is not the case in Death and What Comes Next . It's a dead loss on all counts, except that it is only one page long, so it is but a small waste of time. Death and What Comes Next on The L-Space Goodreads review

★★★★☆ Hanging out with Death

Reaper Man Terry Pratchett Death (the character, not the phenomenon) is the only real hero of Terry Pratchett 's Discworld . Unlike every other Discworld character (with Granny Weatherwax and Lord Vetinari as sporadic but unreliable exceptions) Death is relentlessly competent and by his lights ethical. He's also a kind of cool guy to hang out with. Already he has developed a personality. Although Reaper Man is only the second book in the Death subseries , we readers have seen quite a lot of him. In a series in which violence plays as important a role as Discworld , and in which in addition there is a specific character who shows up every time someone dies, you can safely bet that Death is going to have at least a cameo in each Discworld novel. Not everyone loves Death. There is a body of people -- well, not people, best just call them entities -- called the Auditors of Reality who take it on themselves to make sure the universe runs as it ...

★★☆☆☆ Misery, Canadian style

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories Margaret Atwood (Editor), Robert Weaver (Editor) I read The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories , (eds Margaret Atwood , Robert Weaver ) because it is the textbook for a community college course I've registered for this winter called "Writing Short Stories". This is one of the worst short story collections I have ever read in my life. I noticed early on that it appeared to be the same story over and over again. A man and a woman are trapped in a desperately unhappy marriage. Maybe something happens, or maybe not. It is evident that for Atwood and Weaver plot is entirely optional. Some of the stories had one, and some did not. There were rare exceptions to the desperately unhappy marriage storyline, in which the characters were miserable for other reasons. You know that feeling of relief as you approach the end of a really bad book? I had that feeling 45 times in rapid succession as I worked my ...

★★★★★ Enjoyable guide to vegan nutrition

Laurel's Kitchen Laurel Robertson, Carol Lee Flinders, Bronwen Godfrey I do not cook, I don't want to cook, I don't plan to cook. (Very happy to buy my whole wheat bread from the bakery at my big box grocery store thank-you-very-much.) I have never tried a recipe from Laurel's Kitchen , and I never will. So why, you ask, am I reviewing a cookbook? Because I read it with pleasure, and I am here to tell you that it is worth reading, even if you don't cook. I was a grad student in Biochemistry at Stanford when I read Laurel's Kitchen , probably around 1980, not many years after it was published. Many of my friends were dance and drama students. This was very much the astrology and granola crowd. (I was the token hard scientist of the bunch.) They alerted me to the existence of Laurel's Kitchen . Laurel's Kitchen was a surprisingly good read. It was as entertaining as a novel, indeed, more entertaining than many novels I have read (looking at you, Fifty...

★★★★☆ Go, Team Weird!

Premeditated Myrtle Elizabeth C. Bunce Probably when you were a kid there were times when you felt you were not like other kids. (I may be wrong, but I'm guessing this is a universal human experience.) Myrtle Hardcastle (the hero of Elizabeth C. Bunce 's Myrtle Hardcastle series is a precocious 12-year-old girl, the daughter of Prosecutor Arthur Hardcastle. His position is something like that of a District Attorney in the modern US legal system -- a government lawyer whose job is to prosecute criminals in court. As Elizabeth C. Bunce explains in an Author's Note, such Prosecutors were a relatively new thing in England in 1893. Myrtle is motherless -- her mother, who studied to be a physician, died of cancer some years ago. Myrtle's ambition is to be a detective or prosecutor or something like that. (She probably knows precisely what she wants -- that would be like Myrtle, but she was not entirely explicit about her plans, hence my vagueness.) To this end sh...

★★★★★ Finding a home

The Blue Sword Robin McKinley When I was growing up my father's job kept my family moving. Mom and Dad eventually settled down, but just when they did I became an itinerant academic, moving to study and work at various research institutions. I was a 27 year old grad student at Stanford when I first read The Blue Sword and the longest I had ever lived in one place was six years. (Understand, I am not complaining -- I was and am a Happy Nomad.) There's a peculiar type of homesickness experienced by rootless people. One usually thinks of homesickness as being away from and missing a very specific place -- the place one calls home. But I had no place to call home. And yet I sometimes felt homesick -- I felt the lack of a home -- all the more because there was no home where I longed to be. In the first few chapters of The Blue Sword I immediately recognized this feeling of rootless homesickness in Angharad (Harry) Crewe, the hero of the book. As the book begins Harry ...

★★★☆☆ The Saint of Steel formula for romance

Paladin's Hope T. Kingfisher The novels in T. Kingfisher 's Saint of Steel series have a consistent formula. (I speak only of the first three, since I have not yet read the last one.) They are told from two points of view: that of one of the paladins of the late Saint of Steel and of the paladin's romantic interest. This is an unusual (to me) form for a romance. Because we are in the heads of both the putative romantic partners, we know from the start that they find each other attractive. Now, I am not a big fan of romance novels. And when you eliminate the "He loves me, he loves me not..." suspense for the reader you take much of the air out of the romance plot. The characters themselves are left in suspense, they do a lot of "He loves me, he loves me not..." agonizing, and since you're in their heads, you hear all about it. Add to this that the paladins share a history and certain personality traits. This was not a big problem in book 1, Paladi...

★★★☆☆ Lacking the common touch

100 Selected Poems: John Keats John Keats Well, that was disappointing. I am ready to admit that this is an "It's not you -- it's me," case. Since I suspect that some other readers, even readers who love poetry, may likewise find Keats disappointing, I will try to explain why he disappointed me. Thus you can judge whether you, too, might suffer the same fate. First thing to say is that the young John Keats was not really that great a poet. (By "young", I mean up to and including Endymion .) That, of course, is a judgment many readers will disagree with, but don't discount it! It was Keats 's own judgment. In his preface to Endymion , he says "I apologize for the lousy work, but I just had to get this out of my system." (Obviously I'm paraphrasing.) You may dismiss that as false modesty, but I am more inclined to accept it as the judgment of a man who knew what he was talking about, especially because the quality of his poetry abr...

★★★★☆ Confusing and violent

Saga, Volume 5 Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Illustrator) This was the first installment of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples ' Saga that I considered rating less than four stars, although I finally decided not to. ( Vaughan and Staples are wiping sweat off their brows and heaving big sighs of relief at that near-miss.) This is the first volume of Saga after Marko and Alana split up. They split up at the end of Volume 4 not because of marital disharmony, but because Alana blasted off to take Hazel away from danger -- at least, that was the intention. Marko is left with Prince Robot IV, who is pursuing them. And the story of Gwen, The Brand, and former slave girl Sophie continues. We swap back and forth among them frequently, and Marko spends much of the story experiencing flashbacks under the influence of fadeaway. Marko, as was previously established, is a kind of super-warrior when he can be convinced to fight...

★★★★★ Witches and pain magic

Storm Cursed Patricia Briggs As I have noted elsewhere , the three pillars of magical society in Patricia Briggs 's Mercyverse , also Mercyverse , are werewolves, vampires, and fae. However, she also feels free to import any folkloric creatures that anyone has ever told stories about. Thus Mercy herself is descended from First Nation not-quite-a-god Coyote. Aside from the big three, most of these other magical beings are one-offs. And since Briggs is all about the politics and palace intrigue, they don't have the standing to become pillars of Mercyverse magical society. In fact, the first three books, Moon Called , Blood Bound , and Iron Kissed , served as introductions to werewolves, vampires, and fae, respectively. If there is a fourth, it is witches. Witches are important in the Mercy Thompson series and even more in the companion Mercyverse series Alpha and Omega . Columbia basin witch Elizaveta Arkadyevna has a...

Search This Blog