Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Bookoutre, and Kate Hewitt for the advanced reader copy of the book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.
There are so many historical fiction books out there for the period of the Second World War, it’s hard to find a new angle. Perhaps The Girl on the Boat isn’t quite a new angle, but there’s a good perspective here that’s different than many of the rest and is a good beginning to a promising series of books.
Sophie Weiss is a German Jew in the 1930s. She and her family make a plan to leave Germany, boarding the S.S. St. Louis with other German Jews. Their destination is Havana, and then, hopefully, the United States. On board the ship, Sophie makes friends with three female refugees close to her own age. Rosa, Hannah, and Rachel each have their own stories for how they arrived there. The trip to Havana is enjoyable, but when they arrive, there is a problem. The Gestapo have already been to Havana stirring up anti-Semitic sentiment.
Sophie’s father has contacts in America and manages to get her off the ship. Before she leaves, she splits one of her late mother’s emeralds into four pieces, and the girls promise to meet up after the war is over in Paris. Sophie goes to Washington DC, the guest of a friend of her fathers who, it turns out, is a lech. She makes her own way, working for a Jewish refugee organization, but she’s loaded with survivor’s guilt and finds it hard to have any sort of life.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the S.S. St. Louis was, in fact, a real ship that left Germany with Jewish refugees and was turned away from Havana. The U.S. wouldn’t let the refugees disembark there, either. I remember my mother (who was born in 1927) telling me about this, although she didn’t know the details. She just knew what a horrible thing had happened to fellow human beings. The ship sailed back to Europe, where there was a brief respite of the refugees being allowed into Belgium, France, Holland, and Britain. We all know which of those countries the Nazis eventually invaded anyway.
This is the first in a series of four books subtitled “The Emerald Sisters.” This one mostly covers Sophie’s story. It begins after the war, at the cafe near the Eiffel Tower where the girls promised to meet up. Three of the girls are there, only we don’t know which one of the three is missing. To find that out, you’ll have to continue reading.
Sophie carries the burden of living a good life in Washington DC while her family and friends are suffering. It’s something that’s brought up over and over again because of how much it’s a part of her everyday life. She yearns to be a carefree young woman, but she can’t stop thinking about how her family and friends are suffering. Eventually, she does find a first love, but even that is not going to work out how she would like. I felt this was a weak point in the plot, but it wasn’t enough to make me not recommend it. I just had a hard time believing the romance developed between these two people and that Sophie would have
The writing was good. I felt involved with the girls, even though this is mostly Sophie’s life. They were each distinctly different and had their own stories to tell. We have a brief glimpse of their lives which will be filled in later on in the series. The author did a great job beginning a series I would like to follow to its conclusion. That she based it on actual events is also good. I like how Sophie extrapolated how the Nazis persecuted Jews to how the blacks were being treated in America. There was plenty of sin to go around, even if we couldn’t see it at the time.
I enjoyed the book, if I felt it was a little short. It left off with a good cliffhanger for the next book, which I will definitely be picking up when it comes out. The characters have depth and were sympathetic. That it is based on actual events also helps drive the story home, especially when we are turning away refugees even now.
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Great review, Patti.
The S.S. St. Louis incident is, like Executive Order 9066. one of the ugliest and most painful blights on America’s behavior both before and during World War II. Right-wing Americans love to think that the United States is the greatest country on Earth and that its people (meaning the white majority at the time) could do no wrong. So pervasive is this message that I used to believe at least some of this mythology – at least as far as the U.S. being the best nation to live in went.
I hope that novels such as “The Girl on the Boat,” movies like “Voyage of the Damned,” and documentaries along the lines of Ken Burns’ recent “The U.S. and the Holocaust” open at least some of our fellow Americans’ eyes and wake them up from the false narratives of the more toxic wing of American conservatism.
It’s so important when you see what’s going on right now at our southern border.
The problem is, though, that these stories, whether they’re couched in fiction (as “The Girl on the Boat” is) or told in a factual, non-fiction documentary by Ken Burns, are usually consumed by folks who know that our country, people, and culture have a dark side (as does every other country, I think), while the folks that SHOULD read, watch, or listen to them either ignore or pooh-pooh them for a plethora of reasons, none of them good ones.
Again, great review. I look forward to see what you think of the other books once you read them.
A casual comment from someone one Threads (?) the other day claimed that the people who are coming to the southern border are not fleeing violence. I wanted to throttle him. Instead, I asked how he knew this, in light of the violence in Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador? No answer.
Great review as always, Patti. Wish the [unladylike language] folk spreading bullshit about the border would read books like this.
Oh yes, it’s so true. Not to mention so many of the oppressive regimes have roots in our country deposing people who we didn’t “like” and propping up others. I tell people, we broke it, we bought it but they don’t grasp it at all.
Sadly, true. It’s all part of a whole.