I’ve always been a fan of Chris Bohjalian, because I think that he writes very interesting books from the perspective of female characters without making the books seem forced or awkward. And he also writes about Vermont, usually, and I’m a big fan of Vermont, so it’s fun to be transported there for a few hours while I chew on one of his novels.

Skeletons at the Feast is an interesting departure for him, because it’s a historical novel, not a modern novel, and it’s set in wartime Germany, not Vermont. And, while it was a bit slow and stiff at first, it got more interesting by the end, and I started to get really into the characters and the scenery. In his afternote, he mentioned that he had read a journal written by a Prussian refugee and talked with a Holocaust survivor while researching the book, and these two things I think really brought it to life, made the book feel more real.

He wrote the story from a couple of perspectives, following refugees, Jewish women on a death march, and a Jewish man struggling to reach the West. He managed to bring his characters to life with few brushstrokes and minimal backstory; no constant backtracking to the glory days of such and such a time, and I liked that. It made the story seem more vivid and real, somehow.

I like that he made his German characters culpable for what happened in the Holocaust, but not in an accusatory way, and he really emphasized the ambiguous moral ground. His German characters are simply trying to run a farm in a far-off corner of what was once Poland, and their situation made me wonder what I myself would do in a similar turn of events. I think it’s easy to turn a blind eye to a situation when the stakes are high and the benefits seem minimal, at best, so it was interesting to be put into those shoes for a bit.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, in case you read the book, but I will say that I also liked that things didn’t turn up daisies in the end, the ending was not happy in the conventional sense, and the characters definitely suffered. I suppose that’s kind of par for the course for novels set in this time period, but I still appreciated his willingness to push his characters, rather than to give them a break at the end.

One of the reviews of this book compared it to The English Patient, which seemed a bit excessive, but it was a pretty darn good book, and I’d recommend it without reservations.

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Skeletons at the Feast, by Chris Bohjalian. Published 2008, 363 pages. Fiction.