Jessica Shattuck The Women in the Castle

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today we are happy to have with us Jessica Shattuck author of The Women In the Castle published in March by William Morrow.Jessica’s previous work includes her novel The Hazards of Good Breeding, a NYT Notable Book.Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Glamour and many other periodicals. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Times, Mother Jones, Wired and the Globe.The Women In The Castle explores the lives of three survivors of Hitler’s Germany.Marianne, Benita and Ania.Marianne is the natural leader. A righteous woman bound by a promise made to a hero, a man who wished to see his country remain a free and just one who decides to attempt to assassinate Adolph Hitler. An attempt that failed and that led to his hanging as well as Albrecht’s, Marianne’s husband and hundreds of others including Ania’s husband as well.Now Marianne is responsible for bringing the women and their children together to her castle where they attempt to rebuild lives. An attempt that also fails in part, fails in part because it is an enormous task but also because each of the women, just like each of us, is not necessarily what they seem or what we expect them to be.This dynamic drives the novel and pushes and pulls us many ways at once. Jessica places the reader in a precarious position (always a good thing) where we have to work out for ourselves who is right, who is wrong, who is absolved and who isn’t, who is on the right side of things.The novel is emboldened and elevated by the dilemmas it poses to us but it is also driven forward with sheer energy and a story that captivates from the Prologue to the epilogue.