Review: Smart and Unforgettable
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 8, 2014
What an engaging and affecting suspenseful story that is exceptionally well-written.  It's always troubling to remember the depths of the horrors of Nazi Germany, and this story delivers strong characters confronting the dark mystery of their past, unraveling trauma by trauma and stirring up new dangers in the process. It's a great storyline that resonates on a lot of levels and certainly works as a historical World War II era mystery. On other levels it's a multi-generational story of reunions: the reunion of missing/estranged family relationships, of parts of a whole, of each individual's reconciliation with their past. It's also an exploration of the juxtaposition of opposites and the place where those differences meet: different religions, past v. present, mothers v. fathers, east v. west, truth v. lies and of course the major divide of good v. evil.Fine's writing makes it all soar. He makes the 50-year-old brothers real to us with all of their complex feelings and immediate danger, as well as bringing to life the pain of the past.  His descriptions are memorable and made reading a deep pleasure, elevating things as simple as historical documents to lyrical objects with meaning. The action writing is fantastic, harrowing and believable. In all, this is a really well-constructed novel I won't soon forget.