Book Review: The Women in the Castle – by Jessica Shattuck

Historical fiction is one of my favourite genres. Reading stories about characters living through important periods in history can provide a truly unique perspective on how people actually experienced that era, in ways that go beyond the tried-and-tested stories of history’s “main characters”.  

A great example of this is The Women in the Castle. This book tells the stories of war-time widows. These aren’t the widows of allied or German soldiers though, but rather the widows of German resistance fighters who are executed after a failed attempt on Hitler’s life.

Our main character, Marianne, fulfills her promise to the resistance by finding and bringing together these widows in the dying days of the war.  But rather than a bond of solidarity and shared loss, Marianne and the other women must confront their own unique experiences of the war, their conflicting feelings toward each other and their spouses, and somehow find a way to build a future for themselves in post-war Germany.

This is a perspective I never before considered and one that certainly wasn’t covered in any of the history classes I’ve taken. I am almost halfway through and am enthralled and appalled by the experiences these women go through; a compellingly written example of an author writing about a merciless time and who shows no mercy to her characters living through it.