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Going Over (2014)

by Beth Kephart(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1452124574 (ISBN13: 9781452124575)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Chronicle Books

review 1: Actual rating: 2.5. Gorgeously written. Impressively researched. But something about the story just couldn't keep my interest. Set in Berlin during the Cold War, Going Over is a story of a boy and a girl in love, but separated by the Iron Curtain. Even though I grew up during the end of the Cold War (I was 20 years old when the wall came down in 1989), I really didn't have enough background knowledge about life in East and West Berlin to truly appreciate this story. If this was true of me, I can't imagine how a teen will get through it. The love story aspect is, of course, easy to identify with - a boy and girl can be separated by all kinds of things and the wall can be a symbol of that. It's the details of day-to-day life in Berlin that might be tough for teens. ... moreReading this book did make me want to learn more about that, though. And Kephart gives an exhaustive list of what seems to be interesting sources from which to refer. This is a quality historical novel and it belongs in a high school library. It's just not going to have wide appeal.
review 2: I started following Beth Kephart after another writer whom I admire wrote of Kephart writing poems and sticking them in her mailbox during a particularly difficult season in her life. After reading this novel, it is not hard to imagine Kephart as a poet. Through shimmering, rhythmical prose, she animates the gray, divided Berlin of the early 1980s, bringing it into living color. United by love but divided by concrete, Ada and Stefan, her teenage protagonists, forge their emerging identities against the Wall that separates them. She vents her rage against it from the West by spray-painting murals of the great escapes; he faces it from the East each morning with resignation, fearful that a great escape of his own could result in repeating his father's fate. The human impulses of safety and freedom are at war in Stefan, and the novel persists in asking the question: Are people ever truly safe so long as they are not free? I won't give away the ending. Suffice it to say that it is based on true events, and that once the pieces are all in place, it comes as quickly and effortlessly as rain. less

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