City of Women is set in Berlin; it opens in 1943, in a movie theater. Berliners are facing food and other shortages, their men at away at war, neighbors turn in each other to the authorities and an atmosphere of distrust prevails. Sigrid is lonely, harried by her mother-in-law, and meets a strange man at the cinema with whom she starts an affair. She also meets a young woman who comes to her for aid when the police come into the cinema looking for people with false papers. These chance encounters change her life irrevocably.
City of Women has elements that remind me of other novels. Like the Paris Architect, the first 100 pages are incredibly suspenseful, and as in both The Nightingale and Paris Architect, apolitical and war-weary individuals nevertheless become engaged in the resistance. Essentially, these individuals come to the point where they say, no more, and their concern for friends, lovers, and strangers overwhelms their sense of self-preservation.
It's partly a novel about female friendship and how that is tested by extreme situations like war. Over the course of the novel, everything deteriorates. Danger comes closer for everyone.
Charles Finch, the Chicago-based author of a the Charles Lenox series (an amateur detective in Victorian London), wrote a lovely and thoughtful review of this novel for USA Today. Here's the link: http://usat.ly/1Qcy8WL
I think most readers who enjoyed The Nightingale and the Paris Architect will enjoy City of Women as well. I do think that the sex here is portrayed in a less delicate way that in those other novels, in part because here it's a really important mover in the plot and the changes that Sigrid undergoes.
City of Women has elements that remind me of other novels. Like the Paris Architect, the first 100 pages are incredibly suspenseful, and as in both The Nightingale and Paris Architect, apolitical and war-weary individuals nevertheless become engaged in the resistance. Essentially, these individuals come to the point where they say, no more, and their concern for friends, lovers, and strangers overwhelms their sense of self-preservation.
It's partly a novel about female friendship and how that is tested by extreme situations like war. Over the course of the novel, everything deteriorates. Danger comes closer for everyone.
Charles Finch, the Chicago-based author of a the Charles Lenox series (an amateur detective in Victorian London), wrote a lovely and thoughtful review of this novel for USA Today. Here's the link: http://usat.ly/1Qcy8WL
I think most readers who enjoyed The Nightingale and the Paris Architect will enjoy City of Women as well. I do think that the sex here is portrayed in a less delicate way that in those other novels, in part because here it's a really important mover in the plot and the changes that Sigrid undergoes.
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