TBR for the TOB!

3.5 starsThis book won second place in the Morning News Tournament of Books for 2014: https://themorningnews.org/tob/2014/ I do love the smallest of details here - like all the items sent to Ursula's dad during the war for Christmas or reading Jane Eyre at the beach or building sandcastles at the beach (maybe I just miss the beach).  But I'm at a loss as to why there are so many mis-starts here and Ursula has to keep dying as a child.  Is this reader manipulation to see a child die so many times...but don't worry she'll be back?  Is this a gimmick?  Or at least a way to distinguish this from the leagues of other WWII books?  At least it isn't quite as saccharine as I expected.   But it is a bit difficult to live these many (certainly miserable) moments with Ursula and then have to do it all over again with little to grasp onto linearly, despite all of the lovely details.  This book might have been too much for me to take at this moment (there are also very sad details).  I can't say I'm really a fan of seeing a character die over and over again.  It's like that one episode of Supernatural that I can't handle, Dean dying over and over again (you know, more than the usual number of deaths.)  Wrong reader, wrong time for this, I guess, but the book could have been much worse.  The story seems to be a bunch of squares of a quilt left unstitched, and I can see why there might be a purpose to that in this book, but I want a quilt.  Also, I might have been spoiled by Tournament books this year.