Stef Penney

This book suffers from way too many characters and story lines. To its credit, the characters are all interesting and are well fleshed out (there are back stories to their back stories!!!) but in the end, some are wholly peripheral to the story. In a novel like this, you would expect the landscape to be a character in itself and much has been made of the author's agoraphobia and her feat of imagining a Canadian winter from the muggy confines of London but to me (fresh off a Cormac McCarthy novel and a viewing of The Revenant), the landscape did not come alive at all. Still, the story kept me interested and there were some genuinely poignant moments. Three stars it is!!!… (more)

Picked this up at random in the library but was not disappointed. Set in Paris at the time of the Franco Prussian War (knew nothing about this), the story follows several character whose lives overlap. One man works as a vet in the zoon, a young woman who is living in a hospital for the insane, a young American Civil War veteran who worked as a surgeon but wants to write poetry, and a young man from rural Canada who is looking to escape this his narrow life. Paris is the "City of Lights" with so much excitement, everyone is optimistic and life is good. However, when France invades Germany, life begins to change even though people think it could never happen.

The story follows the two young men who eventually become lovers, Anne, the young woman who manages to leave the hospital and gain some independence, and the man who does all he can to protect the animals.

The story was interesting, I liked the characters who were all believable, and I learned a bit of European history.… (more)