Postcards from Berlin: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A Gripping Story
Review: I loved this book. I found Cat a very appealing character, and the story of her troubled childhood brought a lump to my throat. Right from the atmospheric opening, when carol singers arrive at Cat's house, the world of the story is vividly evoked. Margaret Leroy writes beautifully - the book is full of delicately described detail and sensitively observed relationships, and the love between mother and child is tenderly depicted. From the beginning, there is a sense of unease, with hints that this perfect world is going to fall apart. As the trap started to close around Cat, I found myself reading raptly, completely gripped by the story.

Rating:
Summary: The past threatens the present
Review: If you can run from your past and cover your tracks, hide inside the identity of a loving family, construct a normal life, maybe you will have the security you always dreamed of. If your name is Catriona and you have lived through a nightmarish childhood, then married Richard, a loving husband, and are the mother of two daughters, Sinead and Daisy, who can say you aren't the same as everyone else? No one can see this kind of damage. The daily routine of caring for family sets you far apart from those years, now in a safe place where the past cannot intrude. And during the holiday season, you invite the carolers into your beautiful and welcoming home, flushed with pleasure at their compliments as you pour mulled wine into glass cups held in chilled hands. Everything is perfect, at last.

Even when the postcards from Berlin begin to arrive, you refuse to acknowledge the fear that clutches at your heart. You are distracted when your youngest daughter, Daisy, becomes ill with the flu, tending to her needs. But Daisy doesn't seem to recover, growing thinner, always nauseous and plagued by aching joints. And the postcards come, every day, slotted between letters and magazines, little rectangles that threaten your sense of security.

The cards are from your mother, the woman who abandoned you as a teenager, left you in a home for unwanted children, too old to ever be adopted. Those terrible memories burn deep and you cannot forget the horror of the isolation room, the unexpected beatings, and the thoughtless cruelty. But you survived in spite of it, you made a life and you are a good wife, a good mother. Not like the woman who left you, who sends those postcards from Berlin, begging you to forgive, to come and visit now that she is old and ill. Impossible.

Soon all your time is spent with Daisy. You take her to doctors who prescribe pills the eight year-old girl cannot keep down, then take you to task for not being forceful enough. Your oldest daughter is sullen, feels neglected, more and more uncooperative. Worst of all, your husband is drinking a lot, staying at the office later every night, obviously avoiding you. Your careful family structure is collapsing like a flimsy house of cards.

You ask for a second opinion, even agree to see a therapist with your husband. At last the doctors, now a committee, have decided upon a diagnosis. Hopeful, you wait for their decision with your husband. But what the doctors say is unexpected. Unacceptable. They can't be right, yet even your husband sides with them. Your dream life has turned into a nightmare and you can't wake up. Once again, you are as vulnerable as you were as a child, terrified. But more than anything, you are a mother determined to save her daughter. You make an impulsive decision, setting irrevocable events in place. The lessons of childhood loom large over this life and death battle against the system that discarded you as a child. This time your past will either destroy life as you know it, or open a door to the future. Luan Gaines/2003.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: Postcards from Berlin is an excellent read and a page-turner. Reminds me of a book Oprah would have picked except the ending isn't horribly depressing! Recommend it highly.

Rating:
Summary: easy to devour
Review: This book is scary! There aren't any ghosts (except of course the past)- or creepy crawly things, but just the idea/fact that a concerned mother can bring her child in for a medical diagnosis & have the tables turned on her so quickly. In the narrator's case, the doctor's think it is she who is making her daughter ill.

And from there begins the unravelling- a marriage, the past, a life so seemingly comfortable & steady. Not only is the book quite thrilling with suspense, (will they take her child away?) it is also a meditation on what happens to a family in crisis.

This book just misses the 5 star mark by a fizzled end- the carbonated excitement went flat, & the last few paragraphs fell victim to the authorial hand. It felt like the author wasn't quite sure how to end things, so she copped out with a lame sequence- which I won't reveal.

Aside from that, the book is wonderfully gripping & I highly recommend it!

Rating:
Summary: A Gripping Story
Review: When she was a young teen, her mother abandoned Catriona Lydgate, leaving the child to the machinations of governmental entities. Several years later, preschool teacher Catriona met and married Richard, a divorced father of one of her students. Over the next few years life seems perfect to Catriona.

Everything changes when POSTCARDS FROM BERLIN arrive from either her mother or someone who knows her past. More upsetting is when her eight-year-old daughter Daisy becomes very ill with a stomach flu. The doctor initially rejects Catriona's concerns, but eventually (to shut Catriona up) refers the preadolescent to a pediatrician. The two medical professionals conclude that Catriona is the prime cause of Daisy's disease and bring in the authorities to investigate. A distraught Catriona pleads with Richard to help her hide her ugly childhood from the investigators that she believes supports their position of her being a nut case, but he refuses. Catriona sees her world collapsing but must take a risk on reaching out to the past that could destroy her so she can help her child.

This condemnation of the British health care system is at its strongest when the reader is not sure whether Catriona is a beleaguered person fighting the bureaucracy for her daughter or a paranoid maniac whose buried past resurfaced pushing her over the edge. A romantic subplot takes away from the deep look at the protagonist and the failures of the health care system. Though Richard is described as a womanizing loser, the audience will comprehend why he struggles with his wife's demands. POSTCARDS FROM BERLIN is overall a When she was a young teen, her mother abandoned Catriona Lydgate, leaving the child to the machinations of governmental entities. Several years later, preschool teacher Catriona met and married Richard, a divorced father of one of her students. Over the next few years life seems perfect to Catriona.

Harriet Klausner