ALL MY DRECK!

A Review of ALL MY LOVE, DETRICK

With the current boom in self-publishing and print-on-demand, there's been a veritable tsunami of swill thrust upon unsuspecting readers and this amateurish, horrible offering is, without a doubt, one of the worst books I've ever been subjected to. As it has garnished 100s of 5-star reviews, and is sometimes offered for free as there is a, heaven forbid, sequel, I thought a review here might help my fellow Berlin Noir fans to decide whether or not they want to waste their time on this god-awful novel.

You've seen the plot before: pure German falls for Jewish daughter from the Jewish family that has taken him in during the calm before the storm of Nazism. The young man, Detrick, has an alcoholic, one-dimensional, abusive father. The doting doormat mother trying to keep things together. His best friend is swayed by Hitler and joins the SS gleefully when the Nazis come to power. The Jewish girl's brother resents Detrick and sees him as a symbol of all that non-Jews are doing to him and his people, goes out and kills a member of the Hitler Youth, then flees to Poland to take up with the resistance. Detrick's sister joins the Lebonsborn program after getting used and discarded by a married SS officer. Detrick's lover has a crippled brother and the mother and father are easily convinced that handing him over to the Nazis to be "cured" after the Nazis have made their intentions plain makes perfect sense. Any student of the time period can guess how this plays out. And one family relocates to Chicago for a subplot that adds absolutely nothing to the main story and remains unresolved at the end.

Roberta Kagan tries to weave a tale through all of these historical aspects of Nazi

Germany and fails miserably. Paper-thin characters recite Wikipedia information as they clunk from one plot point to the other. Whole whacks of history are just sumarized in one or two paragraphs before the next short, boring chapter. I could go on, but it's unfair to attack the storyline too much because plots are subjective. What doesn't work for one reader, enthralls another.

So I will get to the biggest problem with this book: The writing is ATROCIOUS! ALL MY LOVE, DETRICK reads like a poorly executed college English assignment. Utterly amateurish, utterly uninteresting, repetitious and without any merit at all. It would be easy to not stomp too hard on the book because Kagan obviously has little to no experience as a novelist - I'll not say she has no writing ability at all because, clearly an amateur, her ability could improve - but she published this to go shoulder to shoulder with "real" books and clearly has a LOT of internet friends willing to post 5-star reviews to convince readers that her book rocks and hand over their hard-earned money!

This book, unequivocally, does NOT rock. Even as a free download, I feel cheated. This book should never have been published simply because the writing is a thousand miles from what passes as readable prose. Without question, this is the worst Berlin Noir novel I've read to date. My advice, readers, is to steer clear of it. It's a waste of money, a waste of time and, even free, not worth more than two seconds of your attention. ANY book will be better than this.