Customer Reviews

Auslander

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4 star:		(1)
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I picked up this book one afternoon at a book store and couldn't put it down until I had finished it that night. Coming from a German background myself, I found Auslander extremely spellbinding. You don't, however, need to be German to feel the sense of family and understand the changes that a family goes through with each new generation. The fact that Mary Powell told her story through the voices of her characters made the reader feel as if she were reading diary entries of the four women in the book. It made the book more personal and insightful. If I had to compare Powell's style to a modern novelist, I would say she's right up there with Barbara Kingsolver.

While I loved the story this book told, I found the many errors in the German very distracting (the German word is "Ausländer," not "Auslander.") I grew up in Austin, and knew there were Germans in Texas, although I am not one of them. It was apparent that the author has never seen German written, and evidently the publishing company did not see fit to hire an editor who had. At first I thought that she was trying to represent possible linguistic shifts in Texas German, but since one of the main characters was a student of German Language and Literature, it was not believable for her to be unable to spell in German, and this was not the only problem she displayed with the German language.

I did love the character development, and I hope Powell continues to write; she is obviously quite talented. She had good insights into the complexity of the female role in society.