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Compared to the meditative ellipticalness of The Door and the jagged perspectival shifts of Katalin Street, this is more of a conventional mid-century Mitteleuropean novel in the vein of Stefan Zweig or Joseph Roth.

That's not a backhanded compliment-- this is one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had in the past decade, with relentless narrative momentum and suspense, with the most shocking revelation coming in the last sentence. Szabo keeps tight blinders on her readers, trapping us inside the mind of the early teenage protagonist Gina as she moves from clueless innocence to experience. We don't know what she doesn't know, and this tension makes this novel un-putdownable.

The Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944 occurs offstage, but the severe and austere Calvinist girl's boarding school she is forced to attend mirrors the oppressiveness of both pre- and post-war totalitarian regimes. I realize this sounds grim, but there are great flashes of humor, and moments of recognition of how the games that adolescents play and the punishments that students receive are nothing when compared to the real life-and-death stakes of collaboration and resistance.