The Girl from Berlin by Ronald H. Balson
Title: The Girl from Berlin
Author: Ronald H. Balson
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Publish Date: October 9, 2018
Source: Publisher
What's the Story?:
From Goodreads.com: "An old friend calls Catherine Lockhart and Liam Taggart to his famous Italian restaurant to enlist their help. His aunt is being evicted from her home in the Tuscan hills by a powerful corporation claiming they own the deeds, even though she can produce her own set of deeds to her land. Catherine and Liam’s only clue is a bound handwritten manuscript, entirely in German, and hidden in its pages is a story long-forgotten…
Ada Baumgarten was born in Berlin in 1918, at the end of the war. The daughter of an accomplished first-chair violinist in the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic, and herself a violin prodigy, Ada’s life was full of the rich culture of Berlin’s interwar society. She formed a deep attachment to her childhood friend Kurt, but they were torn apart by the growing unrest as her Jewish family came under suspicion. As the tides of history turned, it was her extraordinary talent that would carry her through an unraveling society turned to war, and make her a target even as it saved her, allowing her to move to Bologna―though Italy was not the haven her family had hoped, and further heartache awaited.
What became of Ada? How is she connected to the conflicting land deeds of a small Italian villa? As they dig through the layers of lies, corruption, and human evil, Catherine and Liam uncover an unfinished story of heart, redemption, and hope―the ending of which is yet to be written."
My Two Cents:
"The Girl from Berlin" is the fifth book in Ronald H. Balson's Liam Taggart and Catherine Lockhart series. It is a story told in dual times. One takes place in the present day as Liam and Catherine are trying to solve the mystery and help a friend in Italy. The other takes place as the Nazis are consolidating power in Germany and Ada, a young woman, is making her way through the ranks of an orchestra that will take her all over Europe.
The story in this book is fascinating although I was much more interested in Ada's story. She captures the fear of watching all that she has known change under the Nazis as well as her excitement to be a part of the orchestra and to travel to places she has never been before. She watches as the continent of Europe is marred by war. The present day story was okay but did not have the same draw for me as Ada's story.
The writing of the book was alright. There were many places in the book both in the present day story and the past story where too much was told rather than showed. It worked okay for the past story where Ada told her story in first person point of view so that the telling rather than showing almost gave her part of the book a diary-like feel. It did not work so well for the present-day story and really made the narrative drag in some places.
This was an interesting story but it would have been nice for the detail to have been better woven in.