Overall, the synopsis is misleading. I did expect a romance based on it’s description, but I also expected other elements too due to the narrative about the two main characters, Vera and Edith, fleeing Budapest during WW2. (Really Vera is the main character and Edith is her best friend that supports her throughout the story…but in some chapters, Edith is barely seen.)
Vera’s time during the war is expressed in flashbacks, and is limited throughout the novel. They are very short flashbacks. Most of the story revolves around Vera and Edith’s hunt to find love and make a home.
In the second half, I started counting Vera’s flashbacks; she has three flashbacks after 50% of the novel. And these flashbacks sometimes have little significance; for example one is her shortly recounting the time she saw a ballet.
I am not sure what exactly the plot was supposed to be, but the story is set during 1946-1950 and centers around Vera who is a 19 year-old that has escaped Nazi-Germany with her friend Edith. It bounced around starting with one path but then would abandon the path it was on and begin another: from romance to grieving back to romance to culture/society back to romance to family back to romance, so the direction and where it was headed was obscure for me.
I kept reading hoping the story would evolve, but there were no huge climatic plot elements. The characters were underdeveloped with little to no penetrating depth in the dialogue, and much of what happens to the girls is filled with happy coincidences.
If you like light romances set during WW2 with romanticized dialogue then you will enjoy this novel very much. The romance is very much stylized like an old fashioned cookie-cutter romance.
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More about this:
There is a rich history for Budapest, especially during and after WW2. (Though it wasn’t strongly presented in this novel.)
Below is a picture of “Shoes on the Danube”, a memorial to the Holocaust victims who were brought to the edge of the Danube river, told to remove their shoes, and then shot.
Read about the Death March from Budapest and the Budapest Ghetto.
I received an advance copy of The Light After the War from the publisher through Edelweiss. Opinions are my own.