Reviews

The Handkerchief Tree by Anne Douglas

tessisreading2's review against another edition

2.0

One of those typical British weepers set during World War II with lots of period details (everyone goes to see Lost Horizon and drools over Ronald Coleman) and characters who are essentially made out of cardboard; as the back cover says our heroine, Jinny, falls in love first with a Viennese baker and then with her former boss but there's no real personality to any of them so why - or who she'll choose in the end - is left a mystery. My issue here is that one of our romantic leads, Viktor, is Austrian and when he went home, it was to serve in the German army. The author continually reminds us that he's Austrian as a way of making him less complicit, I guess, but... he left the UK to serve in the German army.

Spoiler

When he comes back to Edinburgh, heavy emphasis is placed on his sufferings in a Soviet POW camp; at no point does Jinny seem to register that, you know, he was fighting on the other side. She's lost at the very least one almost brother-in-law in the war and she doesn't care that her ex-boyfriend was fighting on the other side?

I just feel like the near-total lack of emotional heft in this book didn't work given the complexity of the emotional issues the author was taking on.