Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: A Castle in Brooklyn: A Novel

Top positive review

Sure to keep you reading

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 13, 2023

This book has a great plot. The strength of friendship and lives lived comes through. A beautiful story with an unexpected end.

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Evalina

It was not a bad read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 28, 2022

The book was quite sappy and predictable …. The writer was competent, the reader was very good but the story was slow which is ok if you like that kind of thing. For me it was just something to finish

7,878 total ratings, 221 with reviews

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From Canada

G H

Sure to keep you reading

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 13, 2023

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This book has a great plot. The strength of friendship and lives lived comes through. A beautiful story with an unexpected end.

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Peggy

couldn’t put it down

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 6, 2023

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I loved this story. How it all was interconnected.
How it all worked out in the end. The sad and the happy.

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Evalina

It was not a bad read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 28, 2022

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canadianreader

Beautifully constructed story!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 3, 2023

Shirley Russak Wachtel’s debut novel, A Castle In Brooklyn, is a beautifully constructed story following two young men, Salman and Jacob, across six decades from Poland to America. She reveals how the experience in their teens with the Nazis influenced almost every aspect of their future.

I appreciated the reminder that their survival, both present and future, depended on their honesty and trust in each other. In addition to an examination of what makes a house a home and what constitutes ‘family,’ I also appreciated her focus on what ‘being there’ for another really entails. If we aren’t willing to unpack the baggage and deal with the fallout, we aren’t really a support for a needy friend.

While the beginning was focused and compelling, the narrative slowly meandered through the following decades and my interest waned slightly along the way. Regardless, this is a heartfelt debut story about the weaving together of dreams, disappointments, and three hearts.

I was gifted this copy by Little A and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review.

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Lindsay Wincherauk

The first chapter was riveting.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 26, 2023

The first chapter was riveting. And then…

They built a house. A family grows. A child dies. Friendships are destroyed.

Infidelity. Racism. Other stuff.

Who are these characters? Why are they here?

Someone from Japan enters the story. People keep dying. Stories lay unresolved. The characters become pedantic. The house’s new tenants rearrange the furniture. A jogger runs by with water bottles, hugging their thigh (or something like that). A nosey neighbour.

Another page. Introspection. Two vehicles collide.

And then…

It’s been 10 years since 9/11 - was mentioned; so is Aids.

Why is 9/11 mentioned?

Back to the Vehicles Colliding

The last thing he saw was MERCURY.

If it was the last thing he saw, how do we find out?

Someone smokes weed, or does heroin, or cocaine, or…

I’m being mean.

I’m confused. No, I’m not.

I read the acknowledgments.

I rarely read the acknowledgments.

Writing is hard.

The book’s layout is good.

WRITTEN: 26 Feb 2023

2 people found this helpful

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Nicole

Riveting!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 22, 2023

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Just read it. You'll see for yourself. This book is more than a story. It is an inspiration for family, true loyalty, and survival.

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From other countries

Paula

Worth reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 4, 2023

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There were many features of this book that I enjoyed very much. I am reasonably well read in this genre, and there was an air of authenticity throughout. The author wove a background mood that was a fine blend of dark, indelible memory; goal-driven striving; inexhaustible hope; and loyal love and friendship. The first chapter was masterful, in my opinion: a well crafted hook that struck a resonant chord for me.

I liked the way the story line wound through many characters’ perspectives without actually shifting narrator voice. The author had a deft touch with that. I felt like the proverbial fly on many walls without ever feeling a strong, jolting shift. Nice!

Something else that struck me well as I read as the feeling I was getting a peek into a side of male tenderness that we don’t often encounter. The main male characters’ inner thoughts are all explored gently and expressed clearly and frankly. The author did some terrific work in that vein, and I find myself thinking about the men and boys even though I finished the book days ago. I think I will remember them for a long time.

A couple of “I wish you hadn’t done thats” though:

The section that plopped a family from Georgia into the middle of the story was truly bad. The characters were unsavory, their actions were ugly, and the later erasure of their clearly destructive act at the end of their section goes unexplained. It’s like the author found a weird thread, tried to weave it in, decided to abandon it and then forgot to come pull it out later. Ugh. And the inclusion of a totally improbable connection to the main plot was in sharp contrast to the aforementioned authenticity of the tale. The book would lose nothing and gain a bit by that part being omitted. Please.

The time spent on that chapter would have been better spent flushing out a lead-up to the way the story ended. As it is, I closed the book semi-happy with the closure, but mostly feeling like the author had remembered she had somewhere else to be and needed to hurry up and just get this off to the editor.

It’s a good story, and I found it worth reading. I will be on the lookout for more by this writer.

8 people found this helpful

VICKI HERBERT

Jacob was a Dreamer...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 13, 2022

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No spoilers. 3 1/2 stars. In 1944's Poland, Jacob was hiding from the Nazis in the widow Frau Blanc's barn loft...

... with a fellow Jewish boy named Zalman. Frau Blanc sheltered and fed the two young boys until...

The Germans finally caught up with them...

The Nazis dispatched Frau Blanc and forced the two to join a wave of humanity marching toward a nearby clearing and a mass grave...

The Jews were given shovels and forced to dig...

At the first rays of moonlight...

The two friends put down their shovels, fled into the surrounding forest and ran for their lives...

It is 1952 and Jacob now lives in America, working in a seltzer bottling warehouse in New York and taking English classes where he meets his wife Esther...

Jacob dreams of building his castle...

And, following his marriage to Esther, Jacob sends for his friend Zalman to come help build his dream home and live in the house with he and Esther...

This novel was my Amazon First Reads selection for December 2022. The pickins' were slim indeed this month but I settled for this story because the others were just not my kind of reading material.

The first half of the story was very interesting and I thought that I had somehow managed to pick a good book from the pitiful handful of offerings but then there was the second half... whew!!

At that point the plot meandered all over the place introducing many decades and so many different people that I finally lost interest in the whole enchilada.

I gave myself a pat on the back for staying with it to the bitter end but it took me a week to accomplish this.

Summarizing, first half was good; second half not so much.

60 people found this helpful

Scott J Pearson

A few shortcomings, but charming and tragic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 12, 2022

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Two young Jewish men were orphaned during the Holocaust, but by hiding together, survived. They eventually achieved passage to the United States. They learned English, and one fell in love with another Jew who left before the Holocaust. This new couple married and started to establish a life. The other, with a longstanding interest in architecture, built them a house in Brooklyn. From there, this story unfolds with tales of love and loss, of affection and serendipity, and of things that stand the test of time.

The main story focuses on the love of two brothers and one’s wife. This story was emotionally compelling and left me turning the pages. The human strengths and failings of the characters are all too real. The buoyancy of immigrants – and of Jews in particular – amidst adversity is thematically all over this story. In that sense, it is a story of human triumph within loss and survival.

This book is set in history, but is not really historical fiction. Other than the Holocaust, its moorings are essentially timeless and not specific to a certain location. Some of the later stories of other tenants did not catch my intrigue and seemed a bit unnecessary for the main plot.

Life commonly has many starts and restarts. This book underscores that and should draw an audience interested in human perseverance and determination. The characters are strong. This story also speaks of the power of place to house human drama. Lovers of literary fiction will be drawn in because of the appropriateness of these three’s love for each other. Yes, much like each protagonist, this book has a few shortcomings, but not enough to hold back the work from ultimate success.

30 people found this helpful

Mama B

A story of friendship

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 19, 2023

Verified Purchase

Good story. I thought the first 2/3 were great, and part of the last third lost me for a minute. The ending made me smile though and revived the book.

One person found this helpful

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5 star		38%
4 star		34%
3 star		20%
2 star		6%
1 star		3%

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