how much I hated Russell's WW2 book, Thread of Grace -- it's the sense that she's enjoying the pain a little too much. Which is OK when you're writing about Jesuits being tortured by aliens, I guess, but a little less so when about the Shoah.
I liked much of A Thread of Grace, but did think it was cement truck levels of unnecessary to have the adolescent survivor of the partisan group be so damaged by her experiences that after her death in the twenty-first century, her adult children all conclude she was incapable of loving them, especially since at the time when I read the novel I had rather regular contact with a Holocaust survivor who was a mother and a grandmother and demonstrably loving of all generations of her family; I don't pretend that generational trauma isn't real, I know equally some people whose parents were survivors and terrible parents, but Russell's choice really felt like closing down any hope of resilience, which I never enjoy as either a narrative decision or a belief about survivorship of any kind.
no subject
I liked much of A Thread of Grace, but did think it was cement truck levels of unnecessary to have the adolescent survivor of the partisan group be so damaged by her experiences that after her death in the twenty-first century, her adult children all conclude she was incapable of loving them, especially since at the time when I read the novel I had rather regular contact with a Holocaust survivor who was a mother and a grandmother and demonstrably loving of all generations of her family; I don't pretend that generational trauma isn't real, I know equally some people whose parents were survivors and terrible parents, but Russell's choice really felt like closing down any hope of resilience, which I never enjoy as either a narrative decision or a belief about survivorship of any kind.