A review by pwbalto
Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, by Stefan Kiesbye
4.0
It seems like a churlish observation to make when discussing such an affecting work, but I couldn't tell the male characters apart.
This novel, set in a horrible small village in Germany, is told by four (five?) children as they move from childhood through their teenage years. This is a town where Domestic drama and Peyton Place-type small-town betrayals and sins ALWAYS end in murder or defilement. It's the ordinariness of the narrative voice, the dispassionately observed crimes, that make this book stand apart from other rural gothics, and yet I think that same dispassion is why I couldn't keep track of which kid was which.
This novel, set in a horrible small village in Germany, is told by four (five?) children as they move from childhood through their teenage years. This is a town where Domestic drama and Peyton Place-type small-town betrayals and sins ALWAYS end in murder or defilement. It's the ordinariness of the narrative voice, the dispassionately observed crimes, that make this book stand apart from other rural gothics, and yet I think that same dispassion is why I couldn't keep track of which kid was which.