Prague Counterpoint by Bodie Thoene

10Mar. Kindle.

I keep thinking that I must have read something else - how could it possibly have been five days since I finished a book? I've checked both kindles and the desktop app and this is it. Last week was pretty busy and this past weekend was nuts, several times I came home and sat down to read and/or crochet ... and woke up several hours later. I suppose that could put a serious bite into my reading time. And I had this book going on my computer and the previous one on my kindle - so time got split.

It was interesting reading these two particular books in parallel - because there were a great many parallels. Didn't expect that. Fantasy set in the early 1900's in San Francisco and historical fiction set in Europe during the early days of the Nazi expansion. Lots of dramatic chase scenes, I guess. Of course, it is hard to imagine a more serious "evil villain" than the individual and collective minions of the Third Reich and they hound Elisa in much the same way that? Rose is hunted and driven by the evil Paul du Mond and Simon Beltaire in Fire Rose.

The crisis in this book never lets up though; it is downright exhausting to read. I grant that the period is one of the most horrifying in all of human history. At no time has evil operated so openly and effectively -- as one of the characters quotes: "while the world slept." The evil of the madman Hitler and the opportunistic monsters that were part of his power structure and the hordes of smaller, not lesser, evil beings that swarmed in their wakes pale in this part of the story before the leaders of the great powers and of the press who supported Hitler by their silence, self-interest, and active suppression of the events taking place in eastern Europe. Chamberlain is presented as nearly as monstrous as Hitler himself. Craine, Thoene's Nazi- supporting news magnate Craine is a scarcely disguised Willliam Randolph Hearst.

Although many characters from Vienna Prelude are present, the character that focuses the action in this story is a five-year-old boy with a cleft palate - deemed unfit to live by the Reich - so unfit that his unborn sibling is aborted, his mother and father sterilized - and eventually killed - because they were the parents of such a "monstrous" being.