Cheap Charlotte Gray (Book) (SEBASTIAN FAULKS) Price

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Customer Reviews of Charlotte Gray

intruiging mission, roaring takeoff...splashdown in Channel
I couldn't resist picking up this novel after reading the back cover. A young Scottish woman (Charlotte) follows her downed pilot lover (Peter Gregory) to France as a Secrete SOE-type agent to help the French Resistance, and perhaps even rescue Peter. The plot sounds very intruiging...unfortunately, the author didn't pull it off nearly as well as he could have. Peter Gregory dissapears somewhere over France at the very beginning, and has very little to do with the remainder of the book. He's just sort of gone. Charlotte, in France all because of Peter, doesn't seem to have the passionated motivation to find him that I would have expected. Instead, she finds Julian, a member of the Resistance who develops an attraction to her. And yet she keeps herself unattatched (for the most part). Meanwhile a subplot about two young Jewish boys in hiding develops, abut the main characters have relatively little to do with them...and a depressing subplot it is. Faulks knows how to develop drama in a sweeping-type story, but the story itself felt fragmented, like a bunch of different pieces that didn't completely come together. On the other hand, the material was well-researched (through interviews of real people) and though fictional it was historically accurate. kudos

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A Chilling Truth Of The Holocaust Rarely Bettered
The story of Charlotte is peripheral to the eventual all-pervading horror of the treatment of Andre and Jacob. In its never-ending awfulness, you want, desperately, to reach into the book and save them. Of course you cannot and so are but a helpless observer as they pass from one hell to a worse one and then on to their deaths. I have never felt so emotionally drained by a book. I now carry these images with me. I wish I didn't but I know I, and everyone else, should. The final 150 pages are very difficult to come to terms with. But then, why should we ever find it easy to come to terms with genocide?
"It's only a story," someone said to me. Except, of course, it is anything but.

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Could not put it down!
This one was my personal favorite of the trilogy. Eventhough I felt little connection with Charlotte, her perils kept me reading. The subplot of Andre, Jacob and Levade certainly stole the show. Faulks seems always to beautifully represent unjust and tragic contrasts of society during war. The historical detail is rich and convincing. I wish he would now write from a Jewish perspective.