Review: "Shadow of the West" by Sarah Brotherhood Chapman

Shadow of the West by Sarah Brotherhood Chapman
Published April 2023 via Black Rose Writing
★★★

West Berlin, 1977: The daughter of a diplomat, Kate is starting over in yet another school and yet another country. In West Berlin, though, she can't exactly stroll carelessly out of town for a day trip—West Berlin is an enclave, surrounded by layers of wall and death strip and gun-toting soldiers.

East Berlin, 1977: Anika and Michael are scraping by, barely. They are not fans of the communist regime—and the communist regime is not a fan of their family.

With the Wall, never the twain should meet—but Kate is desperately curious about life on the other side, and Anika and Michael have good reason to seek out connections with the West...and to seek out reasons for hope.

I jumped at the chance to read this, because so much YA set in Germany is about WWII, and I'm curious about times since then. The Cold War makes for such a rich setting, and a divided Berlin is particularly illustrative—one side literally walled in, yet with freedoms and excesses, and the other side with...none of that, at least not for the common people. (I know Berlin very well but still have trouble wrapping my head around the way the Wall, and in particular West Berlin, worked.) Here, as a Westerner, Kate can go back and forth more or less at will, and an unexpected connection with Michael makes her far more curious than most of her classmates.

There are some really smart choices here, some of which may be reflective of the author's own experience as a diplomat's child who lived in West Berlin as a teenager: Kate already speaks some German, which makes it easier for her to communicate in the East. (I suspect her command of German is higher than is realistic for her situation, but it serves the story well.) She makes some rather teenaged choices, but she's also been around the block before—she knows from time in Moscow what it means to live in a communist state, and how to cover conversations and sometimes tracks if you don't want the government listening in, and how far she can safely push the envelope. (She also knows, crucially, that as an American with a diplomatic passport, she is at far less risk in East Berlin than anyone she might interact with.) Details add to the story—on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt, for example, Kate and her classmates aren't allowed to open the window blinds. Can't have the Westerners seeing, or making eye contact with, people from East Germany while they're on their way from a Western enclave to the open West. (I'd have loved more direct contrast of the living situations—a comparison of Kate's room in the West and Anika's in the East, maybe, or about the groceries that Anika and Michael can and cannot get. How close are they to hunger? When Kate brings cookies, how usual or unusual would that feel?) The romance is also appropriately complicated, as there's never really a question of whether or not an East-West relationship can work.

The ending (vagueness to avoid spoilers!) is not my favorite. You can see the outline of the end coming from quite some distance, but it would have felt more realistic to me for the original plan to work out. Evil villains who are evil are also not my favorite, and the one here is a guy that Kate literally describes as looking "like a comic-book villain" (loc. 3625) the first time she sees him; he sneers and jeers and laughs sardonically, among...well, a lot of other things. To be fair, the villains of the USSR seem to have operated with a level of power that allowed them blatancy, but villains so slimy they leave tracks will never be my choice in books.

Overall, a fascinating look at a place and time that both are singular and bear resemblance to current situations—think of the way North Koreans are blocked off from the rest of the world, or the way Putin has tried to isolate Ukraine. 3.5 stars, and I'll look with interest for any future books Chapman writes.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.