30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books I've ever read!!, May 18, 2001
If you haven't ever read Goddard, start here, please! This book, despite dealing with some really thorny issues such as war, mistaken identity, blackmail, and abuse, retains such a misty quality about the narrative that you feel as if you are walking in someone else's dream. The mystery, far from being, shallow and gorey, like some American thrillers, insteady takes it's tension from a deep, involved and complicated series of realtionships and webs of lies that intruige the mind.
The story begins and ends with a mother taking her daughter on a walk through the WWI battlefield monuments of France, and explaining what has consumed her for most of her life: who her father was. The answer, given to her by a strange old artist, will surprise you.
If you want a deep, intelligent mystery, you must read this book!
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hard to Put Down, February 17, 2006
With so many plot twists and turns this is a book you can't put down until you've finally finished it. Most of the book is set during the time of World war I. Without being preachy the reader has insight to how the characters feel about the war, and how it changes their lives. Few, if any WW I vets are left to tell their story, I think that Robert Goddard gives us a little understanding into what fighting in the trenches meant, and the waste of lives that ensued. All the characters are well developed, but yet the author still manages to surprise the reader. Just when the reading thinks he/she has worked out the plot, there is another twist that leaves the reader breathless and wanting more. This is my favorite Robert Goddard book.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful variation on a familiar theme, August 13, 2007
This review is from: In Pale Battalions (Paperback)
This is the story of a woman's search for the truth about the identity of her parents and the circumstances of her birth and early childhood. It is certainly not the first book I've ever read on that theme, but it is the best.
The woman, Leonora, was born during the first World War. Her father was a war hero who died in the murderous killing fields of the European slaughter. But wait a minute: the dates - her own birth and her purported father's death - don't match up. What is the real truth?
Leonora remembers Olivia, her witch of a step-grandmother, and and of course remembers what Olivia told her about her origins. But there wasn't much detail there, and Olivia was so spiteful that anything she said had to be taken with a grain of salt. And over the course of her life, Leonora manages to piece together the truth. Maybe.
Leonora learns some of the stories by virtue of her own research, and some other things she learns accidentally when she is contacted by people who were in a position to know SOME of the story. It is that word "some" that makes this book so fascinating. No single individual or set of documents is able to produce a logically consistent explanation for everything that happened. There is always at least one loose end. But Leonora persists, and finally, as an elderly woman, she believes she has pieced together the whole story.
The book is told flashback fashion, as Leonora relates the entire story to her daughter Penelope, who is by now a grown woman. And it can't escape the reader's attention that almost every bit of information Leonora has acquired has come to her as part of an oral history, related by someone who might have his or her own axe to grind. Once we come to the end, however, the bits and pieces hang together logically - in fact, brilliantly logically, as they always do with Goddard. Somehow the uncertainty about whether we really have the entire truth seems to make the ending more satisfactory, not less.
For me, one criterion for evaluating a book is: does each page make me want to read the next one? Perhaps more than any other writer, Goddard answers that question with a resounding "Yes." He is simply the best writer I have ever read for constructing complex plots that fit together logically with no holes. This is as good an introduction as any to his impressive talent.
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