Product Description

During the summer of 1968, Harriet is working in London and meets and falls in love with Karel, a Czech student. But he returns home at the time of the Russian invasion. Now, 20 years on, Harriet takes her ten-year-old daughter on an overland journey to Czechoslovakia, to rediscover her first love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #274538 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 302 pages

Customer Reviews

Doomed from the very first page
They say that the first page makes or breaks a novel; and I found that the first page of this novel included something written in Czech-with mistakes!!!
Okay, so the average reader can't be expected to have a clue about the Czech language, and I suppose the author doesn't either, but it got the novel off to a bad start for me and I was then inclined to mistrust everything else about it.
The whole effort seems a bit amateurish in terms of plot and character development. There were several elements of the author's writing style that I eventually found irritating, in particular the habit of repeating key phrases ("Everyone smokes in Prague" being a favourite). There were two mildly interesting plot twists, but in all the story creaked along as sluggishly as a Soviet-era "express" train.
On top of that, the reader must share 300-odd pages with a cast of somewhat dull and/or unattractive (and not even in an interesting way) main characters.
This book tries to be a romance with a political conscience, but I felt that it would have been better if the author had forgotten about the politics and just concentrated on it being a romance, because in the form it is now it fails to fulfil either as a romance or as a literary novel concerned with contemporary political issues.
On the up side, I found the description of Prague from a tourist's perspective to be fairly realistic- it is obvious that the author either knows someone from or has at least visited someone, in Prague. It is also clear that she likes the city very much and I found the description of the tourist centre of Prague quite pretty.
Let's just conclude that, while reading the book, I repeatedly found reasons to confirm the conclusion that I had come to on the very first page- that I would not be left with the feeling that my life had been enriched in the reading of it.

Can you like a book if you hate all the characters?
This is a book that could have been so much better. I hoped for a novel that would tell me something of Prague, give me some kid of flavour of the events of the 60s and the present day Prague. This gave me neither. (If you want a flavour of Prague, you would be better reading Milan Kundera.

This was a mushy, slushy read. The only thing that distinguishes it from the average Mills & Boon is the fact that the writer does not allow the two main characters from melting into each others arms.

The main problem is the central character. It seems almost impossible to find any sympathy for her at all. She is wet, she is ignorant, full of cliches about Mother-love, single parenthood, "radical" (supposedly!) politics. If I had met her I am certain that I would wish to forget her asap. I read the book willing both male characters to escape from her, and her awful child. Feminism is not a condition that should as a rule render a woman helpless, boring and unattractive. (this is what seems to have happened to this one)

The only worse character in the novel was the child Marsha, who seemed to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I have read many novels and found the characters unlikeable. This is an interesting experience if the characters are interesting. None of the characters in this book are! Their suffering, their dreams are made banal by cliche.