My Review of "A Fifty-Year Silence"

Miranda Mouillot's Fifty-Year Silence:  Love, War, and a Ruined House in France is the story of the displacement and exile that drives her investigation into her Jewish grandparents' experiences during World War II.  This is one of those novels that highlights the on-going tragedy that families experience after the Holocaust -- children and grandchildren who search for who they are in light of an unspeakable suffering in the last century.

At the heart of the book is the crumbling home her maternal grandparents purchased in the South of France in 1948.  A few years later the couple broke up, the reasons for which prove more nebulous than mysterious.  They did not speak for 50 years, and Mouillot sets out to investigate why and how the marriage dissolved.

After a life-time of searching for the core of the story through its oral transmission in the family Mouillot eventually moved into the house.  By the end the novel, she -- and we through her -- are left with no tidy conclusions but with some sense of continuity.  It's that story that recounts the continuity that kept me turning page after page.

This is a real literary treat, and I can't recommend it highly enough!

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I received this book free, from the Blogging for Books program, in exchange for my honest review.