Skeletons at the Feast: A Novel (Paperback)

After the first 25 pages this became a page turner. I was invested in the characters Bohjalian created, and I wanted to find out what was going to happen to them. The heroine of the novel is Anna, a pretty blonde eighteen year old German girl. I am always suspicious of a male author who thinks he can write from a woman's point of view. However, it seems that Chris B. has made a career of that. He does a respectable job even in the love scenes. He must have researched these areas by interviewing women. However, the development of his female characters is still a little thin. The German characters who lived a cushy affluent life style were surprised at the barbarity of the Russians.

Their attitude that the Russians were barbarians who were cruel with no basis for their cruelty was surprisingly naive. Had they put their heads in the sand for the entirety of the war? The Germans were horrendously cruel to the Russians in both their warfare and their treatment of Russian POWs. Many German soldiers raped Russian women and their superiors did nothing to curtail this behavior. The looting and German barbarity were well known. That these Germans did not know or chose not to know of their countrymens' cruelty was absurd. They admit to listening to the BBC broadcasts which detailed the horrors that the Germans visited on the Jews and the Slavs. Yet they chose to believe that these were exaggerations. They heard "rumors" but chose not to believe them. Of course, they did not participate in the horrors perpetrated by Germans on the Jews. Anna's father even wrote a letter for one Jewish family he knew. However, they never actually hid a family for even one night. Instead they hung a personally signed picture of Hitler in their living room. The entire family belonged to the Nazi party. Innocent Germans- Please. I don't buy it. I was disappointed with the story's ending. ( spoiler alert) It would have been much more interesting if Anna had been intimate with Uri as well as Callum. This would have been entirely plausible because she found him more attractive than Collum. Then had she become pregnant with Uri's child instead of Collum's, the end could have had a bit of a twist. I am fascinated with novels set during WWII so I enjoyed this book. I have never before read a novel from the perspective of the Germans fleeing the Russian invaders. I could understand their fear, but could not feel sorry for them. This book was a decent effort.