Anyone read The Safekeep? SPOILERS

[RipplePlease]

Oh wow, I read this in 3 days and loved it.
The writing is beautiful and the characters so very well-drawn.
What an amazing new talent the author is!
Finished it yesterday and I know it’s going to stay with me for some time.

Yes I enjoyed it too!

Yes, I loved it.

Loved it! I’m on a WLW book group and it was almost universally liked there too.

It was saucy….a bit like erotic fiction in places!
Such an interesting subject re how the houses left by the Jews taken to the camps were basically stolen from them. Terrible.

The “saucy” bits were really not my thing. Ended up skipping all of them and speed reading the rest.

Interesting topic and I think that the author brought to life how difficult it was for Eva but I cannot see what all of the hype is about.

@TinyMouseTheatre I agree.
I'm not at all prudish, but I thought the sex stuff was gratuitous and didn't add anything particularly meaningful to the narrative.
Great idea and I enjoyed it on the whole...but that did spoil it a bit for me.

I agree @Piggles1979 I actually stopped reading at that point but saw so many rave reviews that I picked it up again and read until the end having skipped the saucy bits. Also thought it was overhyped.

I enjoyed it - inc the rude bits - but it felt a bit like it suddenly changed into a different book half way through!

I loved it. I thought the sex scenes started off good but there were too many.

The comment about it turning into a different book is interesting. I personally would have wanted more of Eva's narration and I did think the enemies-to-lovers change seemed a bit fast. But overall I thought it was really good.

In the afterword, van der Wouden thanks Marga Minco for writing the story 'Het Adres' (The Address), which gave her the bare bones of the narrative. I investigated Minco and I'd strongly recommend the story (full text here -https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/the-address/
)
and her other books, especially Bitter Herbs.

https://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/books/bitter-herbs

Minco's story The Address was based on her own life and featured its own twist (though different from The Safekeep) when Minco was awarded a prize in 2019 (she lived to be 103) and the awarder's grandparents turned out to be the ones who had received her possessions (which they agreed to return).

Thanks @Carla786, I’ll look into that.
I thought the descriptive writing was beautiful.

Fascinating read. So emotive.

I found it a really interesting read and it was thought provoking on the post war issues.

I didn't particularly enjoy it though - found the characters unlikeable and the sex scenes way too much for no narrative purpose.

Yes,,it made me want to find out more about the postwar treatment of Jews in the Netherlands. Wouden wrote an essay before the book about this based on her experiences of moving to Netherlands from Israel in the 1990s and 2000s, I was quite shocked by the anti Semitism/lack of awareness of what had happened in the war she described then.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21863-on-not-reading-anne-frank

I agree the characters were unlikeable- especially for Eva, I could see why...Isabel less so, but she did improve towards the end.