"The Welsh Girl"

I first heard about “The Welsh Girl” on another book blog about a year ago, and it sounded like something I would like. I can’t resist historical fiction, especially books set during World War II. I finally got around to reading it earlier this month, and I was not disappointed.

The story revolves around two main characters (well, there’s a third but he was sort of peripheral to the main plot) – a German soldier captured by the British, and a teenage Welsh girl who lives with her widowed father in a small sheep-herding village. The novel follows each of them as their lives head toward an inevitable intersection when the soldier ends up in a prison camp in the girl’s town.

I thought this would end up being a traditional Romeo and Juliet type thwarted romance, but it turned out to be much more nuanced than that. Each character struggles with what it means to be home, and what freedom is. I highly recommend this book, and I think I will look for some of author’s short story collections. (The author is Peter Ho Davies, and “The Welsh Girl” is his first novel.)

"The End"

When I started reading “Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew it was part of the very small genre of “workplace fiction” – would it be a literary version of “The Office”?? It turns out that while some aspects of the book are very funny (my favorite section: one character decides that for an entire day, he will respond to his coworkers only with quotes from “The Godfather”), there is also an unexpectedly poignant story at the heart of the novel. The author also pulls off the notable feat of telling the story in the collective second person.

I have always thought that people in my office were a little crazy – almost as crazy as the people in this book, but not quite. (No one in my office has gotten fired, then dressed up as a clown and returned with a paintball gun to exact revenge – not yet, anyway.) Perhaps I should start taking notes at the office – someday I could create another addition to the workplace genre...