THE BOOK FAIR

Beautiful love stories offer a sense of awe and longing.  In Dempsey’s novel, even though the plot offers a most tenacious the love story, the author set the love affair in an outlandishly unrealistic and impossible plot.  What further deters the novel from a sense of realism are the flat-line, either good or evil, principal characters.

Rebecca Cassin and Christopher Seeler, neighbors, grow up together in Jersey, the largest Channel Island in the United Kingdom.  When older, Rebecca and Christopher fall in love.  In the advent of WW II, the couple becomes trapped in the politics of war.

Germany invades Jersey and instates the race laws.  Rebecca, a Jew, hides from the Germans but is eventually caught and deported to Germany.  German authorities then return the Seeler family to Germany, their country of origin.  When back in Berlin, Christopher begins his search for Rebecca.  He makes a momentous, life changing decision to find her by joining the SS and maneuvering his command to Auschwitz.

Only in fiction.