“Most of the things we think are selfish aren’t at all. We’re just so conditioned to think that wanting things is wrong.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

I will be honest. I had a rough time with this book and took to skimming.

I thought it was going to be very very different then what it was.

I thought it was going to be lighter and/or more whimsical. I’m not a big fan of time travel books anyway although I have a few.

But I was very confused at the beginning of the book as I found it extremely choppy and difficult to follow.

I also was not into the whole Insta love thing. That happened way too quickly with no development of the characters and their romance.

I did adjust eventually but I didn’t really get into the story very much. This was a book club selection and many of the the members did not really love this either.

I also did not know it was part of a series .I guess I see what people would like. There’s a fantasy element to it and of course there’s the Historical aspect.

For me I had a really tough time. I really don’t skim that much unless it's impossible for me to really get into. I cannot say that the writing wasn’t vivid or not good or anything like that. It’s just that sometimes certain books are for certain people. ( )

I read this one for the Big Library Read. I like the concept and I think it's very clever idea with a lot of potential.

However, I didn't have much fun while reading. It's tricky to pull off multiple, alternating first-person perspective, and that's probably this book's biggest hiccup. The three characters narrated in pretty much the same fashion -which is odd, as they are from three different time periods. First-person is wonderful for adding extra personality, and I still found them bland. They're not unlikable, but there's nothing to really get invested in. Even the romance between Ellie and Kai was lackluster. And I was bothered by the frequent, almost casual mentions of suicide-as-a-solution when the going gets tough.

Additionally, the magic/physics mesh of an explanation was frustrating at times. I like math to be clear and accurate, and magic can have all the whimsy it wants. Combining the two didn't sit right with me.

Perhaps I would have identified with the characters more at sixteen, and now I'm just a picky adult. Shrug.
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I thought it was well written. You'd be surprised at how many books out there are badly written. Dan Brown, for instance. I love time travel books and movies in general. I could tell that it was written by a woman. There's character development instead of just plot plot plot. James Patterson, for instance. I like character development. There might have been a bit too much emphasis on the love story. This will work great as a movie, because it has something for both men and women. ( )

This book was an easy read, but I can't say it was particularly impressive. It tells the story of Ellie, an all-American (and Jewish) schoolgirl who goes to Berlin on a school trip, touches the string of a red balloon, and finds herself instantly transported back in time to the eastern side of the city in 1988. She finds out that the red balloons are part of a long-term people smuggling operation: a clandestine magical organisation exists which creates these balloons to transport people out of dangerous places. With no obvious way to return home, she crashes in an organisational safe house with two other young people, immediately throws herself into a corny and unnecessary romance with one of them, and then gets caught up investigating a string of red-balloon-related murders.

While the bulk of the book takes place in 1988, there are also a number of chapters set 45 years earlier, where a Jewish boy relays his experience living through the Holocaust. These chapters were naturally pretty grim, but I also felt that they were by far the best part of the book. The Nazis' cruelty was viscerally clear, but we also saw people striving to resist: admiring the resistance put up by other ghettos, covertly practising their faith, communicating illegally with people outside the ghetto. This plotline could not fail to be tragic, but it was heartfelt and powerful.

Unfortunately I cannot say anything similar for the East Berlin chapters, at least not in regards to how they depicted their setting. In these, there is a lot of editorialising to keep reminding the reader that East Germany is a horrible, oppressive police state while the West is a beacon of freedom. It's an irritatingly trite take, and the book would have been better served by leaving those remarks out and just showing us what East Germany was like, you know, through the story. What did come across in the story felt like a more nuanced take, if still a bit surface-level in some respects – but perhaps that's to be expected when both POV characters in 1988 are outsiders to the country.

I thought Ellie, the protagonist, was pretty annoying. She has a really interesting plot thread to do with her Jewish faith and her family history (her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, did not want her to go to Germany in the first place)… but it's also her POV chapters doing the bulk of the "Americans good, East Germans bad" thing. Kai and Mitzi, the other members of the trio, were much more likeable as far as I was concerned. All the other 1988 characters felt kind of generic, and the denouement lacked impact as a result. (I also thought it was unnecessary to have a whoooole thing stressing to the reader that Nazis are really, super evil, like you could have read the book up to that point and not got that.)

Despite this review being mostly negative, I did enjoy reading the book overall. The story moves along well, the prose is pleasant to read, there were a bunch of interesting passages, and I enjoyed the whole story thread about Ellie's heritage. I think I feel particularly frustrated because it was an idea with a lot of potential, but some fundamental mistakes (like the extraneous romance subplot and the simplistic depiction of East Berlin) really let it down. (May 2019) ( )

I really, really liked this book! I don’t read historical fiction too much; my knowledge of history isn’t what I’d like it to be and I guess I worry that I won’t really get what’s going on. But I’ve begun to learn that that’s the beauty of historical fiction; we can learn so much from it.

I knew the basics about the Berlin Wall, and there wasn’t much historical knowledge necessary here. It was mostly the characters that pulled me in. The storyline was great - I always love a good time-travel novel - but I so loved the characters. Kai and Ellie... I’m not sure if I’ll ever give up on those two. Benno’s story absolutely broke my heart, as did the last page of the book.

I’ll admit that I was disappointing at where it ended. The ending seemed rushed and I really wanted to know what happened when Ellie got home. Did she return to the same day she disappeared from? Did she lose time in her real life? I have so many unanswered questions, which makes me hope for a sequel. ( )