Review: "The Scrapbook" by Heather Clark

The Scrapbook by Heather Clark
Published June 2025 via Pantheon
★★★

It's the mid-90s, and when Anna meets Christoph, it feels right. Their relationship cannot be easy—he's German, she's American, and to make it work they'll have to span an ocean. But their conversations are deep and the attraction is there and this is a relationship unlike any other that she's had. And: their grandfathers fought on opposing sides of WWII, and with Anna trying to understand her grandfather's experience better, her relationship with Christoph feels like something that can make it tangible. And if Christoph doesn't seem as invested as she is, well. They can make it work, surely. It's fate, or something like that.

The Scrapbook takes place mostly in the 90s (Anna and Christoph) and partly in the 40s (their grandfathers). Christoph holds fast to the story that one of his grandfathers joined the resistance, while acknowledging that someday he'll have to find out—and face—what else that grandfather did in the war; Anna's grandfather has a more straightforward trajectory, but not one without its horrors. His scrapbook, the one the book is named after, is based on Clark's own grandfather's scrapbook, so there's an interesting based-on-a-true-story element to part of the plot.

It was kind of surprising to me how focused Anna and Christoph are on WWII—while I may be misremembering, it is not clear to me whether Anna has any real understanding of what happened in Germany between 1945 and 1990. To be fair, she is a product of the American education system (my own American history classes never made it past Reconstruction, and I never took a world history class), and even now WWII continues to get a lot more press than the DDR. It's so clear, early on in the book, that their intense conversations about war and trauma are not really sustainable; they know each other mostly in short, intense bursts, the sort of brief time frames where people can hold on to the image they want to project rather than letting the more...maybe not the more honest parts, but the more prevalent parts of themselves through. I guess by the end of the book I was still wondering a bit who Christoph is outside the limited parts Anna sees of him. Not the best fit for me, but I'm glad to have read this (I'm always interested in contemporary fiction about post-war and post-DDR Germany).

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