Stones From the River (Burgdorf Cycle #1) [S0036]

1995 PB, clean with minor cover wear. From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Floating in My Mother's Palm comes a stunning novel about ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Trudi Montag is a Zwerg -a dwarf- short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share -from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he's a girl, to the Jews Trudy harbors in her cellar. Ursula Hegi brings us a daring, dramatic, and complex novel of life in Germany through an unspeakable time, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional power, humanity, and truth.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A most eloquent and truly moving story with a hint of folklore, I highly recommend this read."

"I've read lots of brilliant books about WWII, but Stones from the River is different in that it describes the lives of many of the inhabitants of Burgdorf (a small fictional German village) from 1915 to 1951. It is beautifully written, but a book you need to immerse yourself in, definitely not a quick easy read. I have a much better understanding of the years building up to WWII, how Hitler convinced so many people to support him, and most intriguing (for me), how people lived with themselves and each other after the war ended.

I think two aspects of the author's writing that I admired most was firstly that she never dramatized anything. In this it reminded me of The Diary of a Young Girl, humans can get used to almost anything. Secondly, she introduces us to a a big cast of convincing and memorable characters - they include the good, the bad and the ugly. Each of these individual stories could have filled a book, but together they give us a much better idea and understanding of what happened."

"I really enjoyed this book. It was long - over 500 pages - but I was really into it the whole time. The descriptions were beautiful, the characters well-drawn, and the emotions of the main character made you really empathize with her. The story is very sad and parts were heartbreaking."