Only the Beautiful

 

Only the Beautiful 

Susan Meissner

Publication date: April 18, 2023 by Berkley 

Genre: Historical Fiction

Rating: 5 🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷

Summary: A heartrending story about a young mother’s fight to keep her daughter, and the winds of fortune that tear them apart by the New York Times bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things and The Last Year of the War.

California, 1938—When she loses her parents in an accident, sixteen-year-old Rosanne is taken in by the owners of the vineyard where she has lived her whole life as the vinedresser’s daughter. She moves into Celine and Truman Calvert’s spacious house with a secret however—Rosie sees colors when she hears sound. She promised her mother she’d never reveal her little-understood ability to anyone, but the weight of her isolation and grief prove too much for her. Driven by her loneliness she not only breaks the vow to her mother, but in a desperate moment lets down her guard and ends up pregnant. Banished by the Calverts, Rosanne believes she is bound for a home for unwed mothers, and having lost her family she treasures her pregnancy as the chance for a future one. But she soon finds out she is not going to a home of any kind, but to a place far worse than anything she could have imagined.

Austria, 1947—After witnessing firsthand Adolf Hitler’s brutal pursuit of hereditary purity—especially with regard to “different children”—Helen Calvert, Truman's sister, is ready to return to America for good. But when she arrives at her brother’s peaceful vineyard after decades working abroad, she is shocked to learn what really happened nine years earlier to the vinedresser’s daughter, a girl whom Helen had long ago befriended. In her determination to find Rosanne, Helen discovers that while the war had been won in Europe, there are still terrifying battles to be fought at home.

My thoughts: This is one of those eye-opening reads that you didn't know you needed in your life. It is always heartbreaking to hear how anyone who was born different was treated and it makes one reflect on just how little progress society has made. Meissner uses her two main characters to give readers a glimpse into the varied ways that two societies dealt with those who were different. In 1940s America you had to hide your differences and if you didn't you were thrown into a "hospital" and poked and prodded until there was virtually nothing left of you. In 1940s Germany children who had any abnormalities were subject to the T4 program where they were subjected to inhumane testing then ultimately killed. Meissner not only provides detailed research of eugenics but she also touches upon the condition of synesthesia, the ability to experience one sense through another. 

Rose and Helen were bonded together through a seemingly inconsequential and unsuspecting friendship from when Rose was a young girl and Helen a ship passing through. When Helen sent a simple gift of an amaryllis plant to Rose little did either of them know just how significant Amaryllis would be to both of them. 

I received a copy of this title via NetGalley.