Wunderland

November 15, 2018

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 11, 2019
Epstein’s heartbreaking historical tour de force (after The Painter from Shanghai) juxtaposes Nazi-era Germany and 1980s New York City to devastating effect. The story opens in 1933: German schoolgirls Renate Bauer and Ilse von Fischer are best friends as Hitler comes to power and Jews become increasingly demonized. Renate is dating a young white supremacist and, along with Ilse, tries to join the Nazi-sponsored Bund Deutscher Madel. But after Renate discovers that her now-Christian father was born Jewish, Renate and her family are subjected to Gestapo questioning and blackmail. Ilse coldly drops her best friend, and, caught up in the growing nationalism, she betrays Renate’s family. In the East Village in 1989, Ava Fischer receives her estranged mother’s ashes and a sheaf of letters that outline her mother’s biggest regrets. She’s always felt unwanted by her mother, after being left for years in a German orphanage. But after she obtains the package, which contains a shocking secret about her parentage, everything suddenly makes a strange sort of sense. Epstein doesn’t stint on the horrifying details of the indignities dealt to Jews during Hitler’s reign. Man’s inhumanity to man—and the redemptive power of forgiveness—is on stark and effective display in Epstein’s gripping novel, a devastating tale bound for bestseller lists. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners.

February 15, 2019
A daughter strives to unlock the secrets of her mother's past, which her mother has ample reason to hide, in Epstein's (The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, 2013, etc.) third novel.Three women carry the narrative weight of this searing novel, set in pre- and post-World War II Berlin and New York City in the 1970s and '80s. Now that she's a mother herself, Ava, a struggling artist in the East Village, is determined to confront her own mother, Ilse, who left her in an orphanage in the waning days of the war, eventually retrieving her but never telling her the identity of her father or much about her own past. Ilse's sections, set in the '30s during the years leading up to Kristallnacht, make it abundantly clear why. Ilse joins the Hitler Youth female division, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, and becomes an enthusiastic Nazi, to the horror of her former best friend, Renate. As the noose slowly tightens around Berlin's Jews, Renate and her family are not immediately affected by the oppressive racial laws, since she and brother Franz are Mischlings, only half Jewish; her mother, a psychiatrist, is "Aryan" and her father considers himself a Lutheran until the Nazi registration system exposes his Jewish ancestry. The stories of Ilse and Renate are viscerally quotidian in detailing how Nazism distorts their adolescence. Renate's gradual ostracism by her school--formerly a top student, she is subjected to racism-dictated grade deflation--and even by those she counted as friends, is excruciating to read. The characterization of Ilse is more challenging, but her enthusiastic embrace of the lifestyle of a Hitler devotee is authentically depicted, as is her dogged refusal to be disillusioned despite various rude awakenings to the role envisioned for women in the Reich. Representing the German postwar generation, Ava holds her own here and is not merely an afterthought; her relationship with Ulrich, son of an Auschwitz victim, is particularly poignant and echoes the friendship of Ilse and Renate, which neither ever truly renounces, at least psychically.A vividly written and stark chronicle of Nazism and its legacies.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from March 1, 2019
Epstein's (The Painter from Shanghai, 2008) absorbing exploration of friendship, betrayal, and coming to terms with the past begins in 1989, when Ava Fischer receives a cache of letters written by Ilse, her recently deceased mother. The letters were addressed, but never sent, to someone named Renate. The novel unfolds across two time lines, one that takes the reader on a deep dive into the particulars of Ilse and Renate's lives in Germany, 1935-39. The other time line is Ava's, and it loops backward from 1989, when she is a single mother living in New York City, to 1946, when she is temporarily stranded in a German orphanage. Ilse and Renate are best friends, but Hitler's rise sets them on very different paths; while Ilse enthusiastically joins the Nazi youth movement, Renate discovers that she is a Mischling?one who has both Aryan and Jewish ancestry. As for Ava and Ilse, their postwar relationship is shadowed by Ilse's refusal to talk about the past or divulge the identity of Ava's father. Suggest this to fans of novels like Jessica Shattuck's The Women in the Castle (2017) and Martha Hall Kelly's Lilac Girls (2016).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)