[Note: This book review was originally published on October 8, 2010, in Elevate Difference. It has been republished here with the permission of Elevate Difference‘s owner. Though it is backdated to the original date of publication, this review was formally published on Duncan Heights on June 19, 2022.]
Set in 1930s and ‘40s France and Poland, Amandine [Ballantine Books, 2010] is Marlena de Blasi’s first work of fiction. (She’s the author of the memoirs A Thousand Days in Venice and A Thousand Days in Tuscany, among other works.)
The title character is a girl without a history. Or, at least, a history she knows. When she was just five months old (born in 1931 in Poland), a mysterious woman deposited her in a convent with Solange, a lay sister (a nun who is not a sister in that convent). Mater Paul, the head nun there, was given directions never to tell anyone claiming to be from the child’s past anything about the child or to tell the child anything about her past or heritage, even the little that she knew. When the mysterious woman left her at the convent, the child didn’t even have a name.
Solange names her Amandine. Her caretaker was told that Amandine was born with a defective heart and it was thought that she’d die shortly after being placed in the convent. Instead, she survives, and Solange virtually never leaves her side. They live in the convent in France until Amandine is almost ten. Mater Paul has been just barely hospitable during that time and, after one of the other nuns starves Amandine almost to death in a misguided attempt to protect Mater Paul, Solange and her young charge decide to leave the convent and travel to Solange’s mother’s farm in northern France. Just before they board the first train (in June 1940), they find out France has offered a complete surrender to Nazi Germany. Amandine spends the rest of the novel trying to reach Solange’s family.
In the meantime, Amandine’s mother finds out that her daughter, who she thought had died as an infant, is still alive. The major subplot, then, is her search for her daughter amidst the chaos that was Europe during World War II.
In reading Amandine, I found a few things distracting. First, it’s written in present tense, which is extremely difficult to write well. In this case, unfortunately, it’s more irritating than anything else. Second, it’s mostly in third person, but it switches to first person perspective inexplicably somewhere about two-thirds of the way into the book and then switches back third person less than thirty pages later. When I got to that part, I had to go back to make sure the perspective really had changed, and it took me out of the narrative. Third, entire sections of many of the chapters are a single character’s thoughts. While I don’t mind a main character thinking something every know and then, especially when the character is the one narrating the story, pages upon pages of italics (which indicate thoughts) is a huge turn off for me. Not only that, the various thoughts are not just from one character but from many, which makes it more difficult to keep straight without rereading early chapters.
Honestly, it was an okay novel. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, either. After I got past the three major detractors (see above), Amandine kept my attention well. There’s just enough of the war to ground the novel, but not so much that the reader is overwhelmed by it. Except, perhaps, at one point; a few SS soldiers kill one of the major characters, though there’s barely any foreshadowing to speak of. One page, she’s alive; the next, she’s dead. It speaks to the seriousness of war even for people who weren’t (aren’t) directly affected by it.
[Featured image by Pixabay.]
