This book started off really promising but fell flat halfway through. The plot is definitely interesting and unique, but I don't think the story was easy to follow. I was confused most of the time. This book won't be for everyone, I wish it would've been for me, but I felt annoyed by the end. Sachs is an excellent writer, his prose is breathtaking, but this book failed to keep my attention.

As I read I felt there was something new and yet also, at the same time, deeply familiar going on in this novel. This "new, but familiar" feeling remained an unresolved puzzle until the name "Eugene Ionesco" popped unexpectedly into my head. Yes. As soon as I realized how much I was reminded of Ionesco, the seemingly scattered pieces of "Gretel and the Great War" resolved themselves like a puzzle coming together on its own. I could appreciate the whole of the thing at once. I could come to terms with how the pointlessness of some events in this story could also feel, at the same time, full of meaning. I could appreciate the way moments of disgust could feel like moments of joyous wonder. The chaos felt rich and life-affirming, rather than nihilistic. The novel reminds me so strongly of the workings of last century's Absurdists. It gives me the same feeling of 'yes, this story is absurd, just as human life is absurd, and even so, I feel joy when reading these pages, because what I'm reading reminds me that I love to be alive."

This book was so weird and cool and I was very into it. I wish that it was a bit longer and had a bit more explanations/revisited the narrator from the beginning in a clearer sense.

I'll start off with what I enjoyed about the book. I loved the whimsical, almost fairy-tale like story telling. It was a unique writing style that should be used more often. The author did a really great job at making me travel back in time to child-like wonder.

The problem I found with this was the story turned to be a little too confusing. I would have appreciated some sort of family tree or map at the end of the book just to confirm who I was reading about and where they fit into it all. This really took away from how much I was able to enjoy the book and its tying together plot.

I did think the length helped with this issue quite a lot because if it were any longer, there would have been too much fluff writing. Overall, a nice break from the usual reads, but would be infinitely better with some more clarification.

Inventive, odd and very unusual. A lot of wacky weird alliterative characters here interacting with each other (or sometimes not doing theat.) would recommend, it’s also very short. Thanks for the arc

First of thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for letting me read an eARC of Gretel and the Great War. Adam Ehrlich Sachs has created a wonderful collection of short stories with interesting characters that are interwoven and connected to a much larger plot that details life in Austria after World War I. I highly enjoyed seeing the story come together as characters reappeared in later stories and questions that were pondered before are answered later. That facet of this collection made the pacing brisk. For these reasons Gretel and the Great War is an easy recommendation for historical fiction lovers as well as readers who appreciate dark fables.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This book is like finding a box of morality tales/fables from a hundred years ago. In 1919 Vienna, a young woman who can not speak is found walking the streets. When a doctor asks the public for any information about the woman, he gets 26 tales, one to be read to the woman, only identified as Gretel, one at a time before she goes to sleep. The tales come from a man who claims to be her father and currently resides in the local sanatorium. These tales show a society as it is about to vanish after the coming war. Haunting, with people and places appearing again and again.

The war to end all wars had taken its toll on Vienna. In 1919, a voiceless and nameless young woman wandered the streets. Appeals for information on her identity were answered solely by a sanatorium patient claiming to be "Gretel's" father. He insisted that he wrote her twenty-six bedtime stories, labeled A to Z. He asked the neurologist treating her to read Story A: The Architect, then B: The Ballet Master and continue until all stories were completed. Query: "Did the neurologist read the stories to her? Did she understand the stories? Did she ever acquire the faculty of speech?"

Gretel must be sheltered. Story A tells of an architect designing a simple, uncomplicated building. "...alarmingly simple...[with a ] completely unadorned facade. [Decoration] will pose a threat to her innocence. Flowerboxes are hung beneath every window at dawn and removed at dusk...By means of these delightful arrangements the architect is in reality sending...messages...crucial to her continued survival in a city already complicated."

The sounds of church music. The Choirmaster tried to engage fifty-five rambunctious boys. "No one can possibly know how the choir sounded a century ago...a trace of memory of the canonical composers sound has indeed been preserved in the collective consciousness of the city." When the Choirmaster's past catches up with him, he is sent to Sanatorium Dr. Krakauer.

The explorer "exists in his entirety only upon entering empty places on earth." "Everyday he lingers in this city, this contrived, hypocritical, highly populated city. The coffeehouse he frequents is patronized mainly by...poets and pseudo-revolutionaries...who romanticize and mimic in their work [symptoms] of psychosis considered to be characteristic of city living, such that the 'explorer' has become for them a model...source of creative inspiration...".

A court jeweler who has created dazzling pieces for the aristocracy had crafted jewels for his wife on the occasion of the birth of his son. When his wife wears the jewels, the baby will not nurse. The infant seems bewitched and is confined to their townhouse. Twenty years pass with the wife overwhelmed as round-the-clock caregiver. Until...one day...she remembers beauty...the world of symphonies, quartets and quintets.

Royalty must be provided with bears, boars and stags to hunt. This works at cross purposes with the agenda of the kindergarten teacher who can no longer kow tow to the curriculum. The Headmaster has forbidden the teacher from taking her students into the woods. "This curriculum hurls the child...into an airless world of ungrounded abstraction." She wants to show the children that "the hare hops, the stag leaps, the leaves fall". She takes her class to the woods to explore nature.

This reader's favorite bedtime story was about the veteran. "He is in line for vegetables. He must not lose his coins or spend them on anything but vegetables." Mother needs them for soup. He hobbles forward using one crutch. People turn their backs. "The world sees him differently now because of what happened at the Visula." He wishes for a kiss on his lips, nothing more. A small woman, sitting on a gentleman's knee, beckons him. A con... conducted by a ventriloquist. Now he has lost his money and his place in line but cannot return home without the vegetables.

"Gretel and the Great War" is an inventive and unusual work of literary fiction. Arguably, it seems that the ideas of Freud about innocence or lack of naivete are portrayed in Gretel's father's attempts to isolate and protect her. In the setting of wartime Vienna, a gung ho reporter, with a cushy job, was suddenly called up. A soldier shortage, and to the infantry he must go. A returning vet faced abandonment by friends and neighbors who looked the other way. Would Gretel be able to embrace life in post-war Vienna?

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.