SPOILERS!
At the dawn of the 20th century, a girl with the completely awesome name of Lilly Nelly Aphrodite is born in Berlin, Germany. Her mother is a cabaret singer and her father a Baron, both of whom die not long after her birth, leaving her to grow up in an orphanage. The book follows her through her childhood and years of struggling in life, until she is ultimately discovered by a movie director who turns her into one of the most famous silent movie actresses in Germany. All of this is set against the backdrop of both World Wars and involves several characters who disappear and reappear throughout Lillys life. Its really well written, but DAMN is it depressing! I mean, the poor girl grows up a destitute orphan, so you know its not going to be all sunshine and kittens, but this book really gets into the desperation and starvation of World War I and its aftermath in great detail. This book made me incredibly hungry just reading about that extreme deprivation. So, well done Ms. Collins, I guess.
The one thing I didnt really like was the lesbian character Eva, actually. Not because she was badly written, but she was such a pathetic figure that I felt kind of irritated about reading yet another Tragic Lesbian character. Such a horribly overused stereotype. I mean, yeah, it was much harder to be a lesbian back in the day, but every person Eva falls in love with or even gets involved with is just using her, even Lilly. No one loves her back, or even feels any sympathy or empathy at all, and they completely abandon her when theyve taken all they can from her. And then eventually she gets hauled off by the Nazis.
Although now that I think about it, its not like anyone else in the book had a happy ending or any significant periods of happiness at all, so maybe her problem wasnt that she was a Tragic Lesbian character, but that she was just a character in a tragic book.
It was definitely an interesting piece of historical fiction, though.
At the dawn of the 20th century, a girl with the completely awesome name of Lilly Nelly Aphrodite is born in Berlin, Germany. Her mother is a cabaret singer and her father a Baron, both of whom die not long after her birth, leaving her to grow up in an orphanage. The book follows her through her childhood and years of struggling in life, until she is ultimately discovered by a movie director who turns her into one of the most famous silent movie actresses in Germany. All of this is set against the backdrop of both World Wars and involves several characters who disappear and reappear throughout Lillys life. Its really well written, but DAMN is it depressing! I mean, the poor girl grows up a destitute orphan, so you know its not going to be all sunshine and kittens, but this book really gets into the desperation and starvation of World War I and its aftermath in great detail. This book made me incredibly hungry just reading about that extreme deprivation. So, well done Ms. Collins, I guess.
The one thing I didnt really like was the lesbian character Eva, actually. Not because she was badly written, but she was such a pathetic figure that I felt kind of irritated about reading yet another Tragic Lesbian character. Such a horribly overused stereotype. I mean, yeah, it was much harder to be a lesbian back in the day, but every person Eva falls in love with or even gets involved with is just using her, even Lilly. No one loves her back, or even feels any sympathy or empathy at all, and they completely abandon her when theyve taken all they can from her. And then eventually she gets hauled off by the Nazis.
Although now that I think about it, its not like anyone else in the book had a happy ending or any significant periods of happiness at all, so maybe her problem wasnt that she was a Tragic Lesbian character, but that she was just a character in a tragic book.
It was definitely an interesting piece of historical fiction, though.
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