2011 book 321

Sonia Taitz's In the King's Arms
 This book was so frustrating, and I can't figure out why it got so many great reviews (the writing is gorgeous, and it has a happy ending, so I guess that helps). It starts off strong, focusing on the daughter of Holocaust survivors who goes to Oxford to study--but when she falls for a classmate's brother the story bogs down in poetics. The author is apparently a playwright and actually it reads like a play--you have to infer all the emotions and motivations that the characters should be having. There's no meat to the story or to any interactions, it's all just facile talk. I think the two main characters were supposed to be actually in love, but they read like jaded hipsters, everything cloaked in layers of irony (and this takes place in the 70s, before there really were hipsters cloaked in irony). I never felt like I knew any of these people at all. In fact, I found the whole thing really annoying--it never breaks beyond that surface level and it had so much potential! B/B-.