Little to say about Berlin: City of Stones except that I liked it more and more as the book went on, which makes me think that I might need to continue with the series (how long is the series? I don’t know). My initial dissatisfaction was with the wide cast of characters and my apparent inability to keep them all straight, but as the book went on I worked them out, and so, enjoyed it more (definitely the case where the reader is at fault!).
I did enjoy the attention to Germany in the interwar period, as I find too often the historical fiction I read about Germany seems overly preoccupied with glamorizing Hitler, or making it out like Germany’s history was somehow an inevitability. This book nuances the emergence of National Socialism against a wider international history and a focused exploration of particular families and individuals who made decisions that impacted ‘history’ as we know it now.
I had to say the sexy scenes in the ‘Garden of Eden’ were just weird.
Literary Vice 