Romance Review: Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell

So it's been a while since I've done one of these (they'd changed their emailing format and they typically just post excerpts with a very short book blurb) but then I got this one and I just... Well, you'll see. As always, the snarkiness is interjected is all me:

A Trace of Smoke (Hannah Vogel)

Rebecca Cantrell

Some are born to motherhood, others have motherhood thrust upon them.

From the time I held my first nephew in my arms, I knew that I wanted to be a mother. But when I was eight months into a difficult pregnancy and well past the point of no return, I worried that I didn’t have what it takes to be a mother. Those worries are shared by the heroine in the novel I began the day that my son started preschool.

I actually like this part. I like the acknowledgement that being a mother is hard and that at certain points, women who are mothers can feel unsure of their abilities.

This isn't the part that made me spit out my drink, if I'd been drinking at the time.

The main character in A Trace of Smoke, Hannah Vogel, never meant to become a mother. It was hard enough to survive on her own in the desperate streets of 1931 Berlin. Plus she had her fill of motherhood helping to raise her headstrong and glamorous brother.

I'm trying to figure out if "glamourous" is supposed to equal "gay." Reading the rest, it seems like it is.

When Hannah identifies her brother as the murder victim in a crime scene photograph, she blames herself. If she had not protected him from their soldier father’s wrath, he might never have become a cabaret nightingale and ended up dead in a gutter.

So basically, she thinks if her father had beaten him more, he wouldn't have become a singer and then led himself into a death. In the 1930s. I don't mean to be callous but didn't a lot of people die or were mistreated as singers or whatever?

And seriously, she would have preferred that her FATHER beat her brother rather than have him follow a career he is passionate about. How does she know that if he had become an accountant or something, he wouldn't have died in a gutter as well?

Determined to find out the truth about his life and death, Hannah searches for her brother’s killer through smoky cabarets and dark cobblestone streets. She follows a trail of desperate men and uncovers dangerous secrets. Most disturbing of all is a five year old boy who claims that her brother was his father and Hannah herself his mother. Hannah knows this is untrue, probably on both counts. But as the reviewer for Romantic Times, notes, that little boy is “the one who will steal your heart.”

Seriously, does that say "gay" to you too? I mean, how could she KNOW it's untrue?

After the boy is dumped on her doorstep, Hannah tries to return him to his real mother. But as she delves into the truth about his parentage, she uncovers sex scandals that might rock the foundations of the rising Nazi party. How can she choose between bringing down the Nazi party and saving the life of one small boy? Or will they all be sucked into the maelstrom that swallowed her brother and might soon bring down all of Germany?

Wow, a sex scandal that could rock the foundations of what, as we know from history, is considered one of the most evil regimes within the last century! OH MY GOD! She needs to save them!

What?!

She has to choose between the Nazis and saving the life of a child. So she needs to decide between a POLITICAL PARTY and saving the life of a child. Wow, what to choose? What to choose? What. To. Choose.

::rolls eyes::

Let's put this in Canadian terms: say I (as a Canadian) find myself taking care of my dead brother's possible child. I would have to choose between the Conservative Party and the life of the child, or basically an ideology vs a reality.

Are you kidding? Seriously, are you kidding?

HOW DOES THIS MAKE THE CHARACTER SEEM INTERESTING AND/OR SYMPATHETIC? Should I really want to bitch slap her JUST from the blurb? Hannah, you're not deciding between a building with a bomb that's full of people vs the life of a small child. That's a difficult decision. Bring the fucking Nazis down, bitch! What the fuck kind of decision is that?!

::sigh:: My vitriol is odd today. It's not very passionate. I miss my normal writing.