About book The Foundling's War (The Foundling Boy #2) (2015)
I enjoyed The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon, (see my review) but this sequel is not quite as successful. It is, as the title and the book cover suggest, a continuation of the life of Jean Arnaud who comes of age as France capitulates to Germany during World War II. Most of my reading of fiction about this period has tended to explore evil and the struggle to deal with it, so I found this book a little wanting. Amoral adventures and a disdain for politics that seem somewhat charming in adolescence resonate differently when life gets serious under a jackboot, or so it seems to me.But I wasn’t just disappointed by Jean’s scant attention to the Occupation and its pro-Nazi offshoot in Vichy. The sentimental education of a boy that seemed life-affirming in the first novel seems a little over-worked here: it’s too long, too improbable and sometimes too confusing because (even though I read The Foundling Boy only recently) the plentiful characters from the first novel reappear without timely explanation. Jean went to bed, or wanted to, with quite a few women in The Foundling Boy, but in the sequel I lost track of which women were relations and which were former lovers. And although Jean has two fathers and two mothers in The Foundling Boy it was easy to keep them separate because the peripatetic biological parents were both flamboyant characters while the stay-at-home adoptive parents were stoic and rather dull; in the sequel since they are all offstage almost all the time, the occasional references to them had me floundering sometimes (especially in the case of Antoine, his lovers and his other children).To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/01/10/th...
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