This book was chosen from The Book Thing of Baltimore, an organization which distributes gently used books free to the community.

My thoughts about this book when I read it in 2007:

Let me preface this by saying that this is the type of novel I usually never read. It started out to be an extraordinarily long novel with a multiplicity of characters, all with French names (because, of course, the setting was France!). I felt compelled to read it knowing the history of the author who, during the course of writing this novel, was deported to Auschwitz where she died of typhus. This novel as it was written contained only parts one and two of what was to have been a five part epic novel. As I started reading it, I made a list of the characters and who they were to help ease my way through the story. That list helped me a lot as the succeeding chapters often referred back to characters mentioned previously.

The writing itself was beautiful. I could easily picture the various setting as characters moved from place to place. What was especially notable about this was the sense of how French citizenry lived on a day-to-day basis while Germany was threatened and then partially overtaken by German occupying troops. Since my orientation to Nazi Germany was as the child of a German-Jewish refugee to the United States, it was interesting to see how non-Jews of another European country reacted to the invasion of their own country by the Germans. Storm in June was about the invasion; Dolce was about the actual occupation – a time in which time individual German soldiers were billeted (lodged) in French households. (It made me pretty happy to realize that, in the United States, we are only adjacent to Canada and Mexico - although I am aware of other serious threats!) It was also interesting to note how the very wealthy continued to feel more important than their less wealthy compatriots and think that their wealth would always protect them from harm (in essence having the opinion that their very existence was more valuable than that of “common” people). Sadly, we don’t have a conclusion to this story other than history itself.

Happy reading!

I selected this book from the Little Free Library of Twinbrook (#7720) to travel elsewhere...

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