It is rare for me to read a book that angers me quite so much. I wanted to throw it somewhere. The Scrapbook is about a romance with so many bad vibes that I had to force myself to read it. Anna meets Christoph and falls hard. She lives in the U.S. He lives in Germany. After less than a week together, he returns to Germany. This novel, by Heather Clark, is not a romance. It is an obsession. Despite his many promises, Christoph never returns to see her in the U.S. Instead, Anna continues to fly to Germany to chase him down. Ugh. In spite of all his promises to visit her, she must always return to him. I have little patience with women who are doormats.

The actual scrapbook is a scrapbook that reflects the experiences of Anna's grandfather, who endured the horror of coming upon a concentration/death camp, while a soldier during WWII. On the other hand, Christoph's grandfather was in the Wehrmacht during WWII. There is a great deal of discussion of the Holocaust and the war and what it means to be the grandchild of men who were on opposite sides during the war. It is more than opposite sides. The Scrapbook is set in the mid 1990s. Christoph claims his father was innocent of the Holocaust because he was in the Wehrmacht, but by the mid 1990s, the Wehrmacht had already been exposed as guilty of crimes against Jews. There are also discussions about philosophy and guilt and Hannah Arendt, whose writings I have read. Anna is not especially well read. However, Christoph is an intellectual and is impatient with her lack of knowledge.. In appearance, Christoph is described with typically Aryan features, while Anna is described as beautiful and in ways that seem without depth. This romance was doomed, although Anna has trouble grasping that reality.

One thing that really bothers me about this novel is how Anna, who has seen her grandfather's scrapbook with his many photos of Jewish bodies piled high at Dachau can simply enjoy looking at German cities with such terrible history. When Anna is introduced to Christoph's family, she realizes even the furniture in their home is furniture stolen from Jewish homes. Anna's friends are Jewish and completely dislike Christoph and have no tolerance for Germans. For them, all Germans were Nazis and remain so. This is historical memory. Christoph appears to suffer from historical guilt. Although he did not murder innocent people, he is weighted down by guilt. I admit that much of this novel angered me for so many reasons--Holocaust theft that benefited so many ordinary Germans, grandfathers at war, an obsessive romance, a woman who allows herself to be treated so badly and goes back for more, men who cheat, etc. I could go on. I am not the right reader for this novel.

The Scrapbook is a very short novel. It asks difficult questions. Historical memory is relevant The past is never the past. Thank you to Pantheon for providing me with this ARC. This review contains my honest thoughts. I was grateful that the Scrapbook is so brief.

2.5 stars = 3

This book was very emotional and complex. If you like a slow burn, then you will enjoy this. Even though I like the story, it may be too heavy for some. The subject matter is very intense and depressing. Overall, the book kept my attention and it moved to tears.

Wow. This genre bending, haunting, and consuming novel swept me off my feet. This isn’t a historical fiction in the traditional sense— this is a novel of historical memory, the erasure of national tragedies and sins, and how these events can reverberate into our present. This is a novel that you have to sit with and do the work for. If you’re a student of history and social history, you’re going to love this. I also couldn’t not feel for Anna. Some of her choices were painful but made total sense. The throes of first love are so painful and Clark wove ot beautifully in the backdrop of some serious historical scenes/ consciences. Lots of questions remain after reading this. Which you may love or not love. Either way, I love that this felt like a burst of fresh air in the historical/lit fic world. Ps loved the Sylvia Plath reference too!!

This is a very difficult book to review for several reasons. The structure of the writing sort of bothered me as there are no quotation marks and we see everything in the present through Anna's eyes.
The book is lightly based on the grandfather of the author's wartime experiences, which she learned of from a scrapbook his sister's made for him.
1996, Anna is at Harvard when she meets Christopher, a friend of her band mate Josh. She is quite taken with him and visits him in Germany several times. They travel around Germany discussing the war and visit Munich, Dachau, Heidelberg and other places where Anna's grandfather spoke of. They discuss literature and Philosophy .
There are several chapters from the point of view of Anna's grandfather and a chapter from the point of view of Christopher's.
Anna's 2 Harvard roommates, who are Jewish never feel comfortable with him and worry that Anna is going to get hurt. We never really know what Christopher is thinking or feeling. I found the ending unsatisfying.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. The opinions are mine alone. I will probably recommend this book to some of my book clubs, because the issues are important to discuss.

Anna and Christoph meet and fall HARD for each other. It's the mid-90's and Christoph is a visiting student from Germany and Anna is about graduate from Harvard. Despite Christoph's pending departure, they know there is something deeper for them.

Anna has always tried to understand her grandfather's experience during WWII. Christoph's own grandfather fought for the opposing side. This story explores the growing relationship, as well as wartime and the experiences that many veterans never discussed.

.....
So here's the thing. I do not honestly think that two 21-22-year-olds, who attend HARVARD, are going to be having deep philosophical conversations about war. A war that happened over 50 years ago. I mean, the Berlin Wall came down in a time when both people could remember. I know that grandparents are important, and not everyone is close to theirs. I know my veteran grandfather kept many of his memories repressed, and he was at Omaha Beach.

I think this is a good story, but if this was an attempt at understanding one's family, I think conversations work just as well.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review.

2.5/5. I was intrigued by Anna and Cristoph’s toxic relationship, but not so much the flashbacks and the constant talking about history. I do think it was well written and would be a good movie. I think the title could be reworked as well. It doesn’t pull me in like the description did.

I feel so guilty rating 4 books in a row less than 2 stars, I promise I’m not a hater tho.
So for this one, it had potential, and I was enjoying the vibes for the first 50%-60% but then it started getting boring and it eventually lost me, and guess what was the reason behind my dislike for it? He cheated, yup, you heard that right, and then guess what happened? She forgave him, UNBELIEVABLE, I do not support cheaters, nor the people who go back to them when they apologize, and that was exactly what happened.
I questioned Christoph’s way of act, he was so short-tempered but only in mere moments was he okay, as for Anna (or is it Anne?) I don’t think I have any opinions on this character.
Jess’s and Susie’s friendship w the FMC felt so off most if not all of the time.
I was also so confused?? I didn’t know where the conversation was coming from, the start of the book feels like I’m reading from the middle of the book because nothing was explained, and I went to it completely blind.
Definitely have so much more to say but let’s not spread negativity on here.
Thank you NetGalley, the publisher for the ARC in exchange of a honest review.

Anna falls hard for Christophe, a German architecture student,, and follows him only to discover there's more to his backstory than even he is willing to acknowledge. This moves between their story in 1996 and the WWII story of their grandfathers. Hers helped to liberate Dachau, his served in the Wehrmacht. This looks hard at the subject of generational trauma and denial while cloaking it in a romance. Some might be frustrated with the writing style but it worked for me. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

Heather Clark’s “The Scrapbook,” which looked to be much my cup of tea with its literariness and dual story lines of a young couple in modern times and their grandparents in World War II, nevertheless proved less than overall enthralling for me mostly because its principals in the contemporary parts, Anna, an American like me and therefore seemingly the more relatable, and Christoph, a German who nevertheless is ready to hold his countrymen's feet to the fire for their historical offenses, simply weren’t that engaging for me.
This despite my sharing a path of literary studies with Anna – hers at august Harvard and mine at the lesser but still estimable University of Illinois. With the difference, though, that unlike the rigorous regimen that my studies made for me (one 19-hour semester was especially brutal), hers seemed not to tax her that much – indeed, for all her complaining about Christoph keeping her from her studies when he inconveniently comes to visit one semester, she still manages, even with the time she spends with him, to do almost as well as she might have otherwise (me, I had trouble that one semester finding time to take in a movie).
So well, indeed, does she do that she’s accepted for graduate study at Oxford, which she seems not to regard with the intimidation it would make for me – I’d have been intimidated by Northwestern! – but rather simply for the easier access its location affords to Christoph.
So finally not so relatable for me, Anna.
Still, considerably more relatable she was for me than Christoph, who for all the unorthodox German perspective he brings to his countrymen’s attitudes toward the Reich – they delude themselves, he says, in thinking that they would have behaved significantly better than their forebears – he’s a bit of a heel with how he treats Anna, including how he slips away from her once and she comes upon him in an intimate embrace with an old flame.
So even less relatable for me than Anna, Christoph.
A sentiment shared, incidentally, by a girlfriend of Anna’s, who in addition to being put off by his shabby treatment of her is less than impressed by his chest-beating about the wartime sins of his country – poor Christoph, she says, what a heavy historical burden he carries.
Which, for all that I could appreciate the sentiment, what with his behavior toward Anna, nevertheless struck me as unduly dismissive – more than a little mitigating I found his readiness to embrace his country’s past. Still, between his bad behavior toward Anna and her not-so-fully-committed stance toward her studies, their sections of the novel lacked engagement for me.
Considerably more engaging for me, with how both my parents served in the war, my father as an Army officer and my mother as an Army nurse, were the sections about Anna and Christoph’s wartime ancestors, including on Christoph’s side a grandfather who in the losing days of the war was pressed into service as a teenager but toward the end ditches his uniform and makes his way back home, where he encounters an American unit and is pressed into service as a translator by one of the GIs – a grandfather of Anna’s, as it improbably happens, who goes on to capture the Eagle’s Nest, from which he takes and brings back to the States a Nazi flag.
Much more relatable for me, as I say, those parts, than the contemporary love affair, which nevertheless had its moments for me, as when, in that most uncomfortable of moments for all couples, Christoph takes Anna home to meet his parents and the situation's general discomfort is heightened by his father, who when he learns that Anna went to Groton notes that FDR was also an alum and, not so commendably of him, turned back a boatload of Jewish refugees.
For all the discomfort that the moment makes for Anna, though, the visit isn’t entirely distressing for her with how, as they await the father’s arrival home, Christoph shows her his mother’s library, which puts to shame her own home’s paltry single bookcase and includes books by Goethe, Schiller, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Wolf, Ledig, Grass and Sebald as well as books in French by de Beauvoir and Sartre and books in English by Toni Morrison and, especially notable for me for my being a huge fan, Joan Didion.
A particular treat that part of the book made for the literary devotee in me, though still tame stuff against the war parts of the grandparents on either side, including a particularly traumatic experience for Anna’s grandfather, Jack, when his ship encounters a U-boat and for all his assurances to a terrified crewmate that all will be well, he knows full well that, if sunk, they wouldn’t survive ten minutes in the cold North Atlantic – the sort of graphic wartime detail that occasionally made Clark's novel truly engrossing for me.
Indeed, for all that I like to think, with my especial interest in World War II, that I’m pretty squared away on Third Reich details, there was still much new for me to be absorbed in Clark’s novel, including Goebbels having a Ph.D. in Romantic literature and Hannah Arendt having an affair with Heidegger and ties between Nazism and Romanticism and the Allies having actually paid pensions of some German soldiers, even some Waffen-SS.
But most compelling for me for the sheer horror of it on either side was the toll of the air raids, most notably, with the amount of detail accorded it, the bombing of Hamburg, which Christoph notes killed 40,000 in a single night and made for a million people leaving the city (some of the women, he noted, had corpses of dead babies in their suitcases) and which he describes to chilling effect:
“It was like Nagasaki. People tried to escape the bomb cellars when the oxygen ran low and the walls got hot, but they got stuck in the melting asphalt outside. Or they died in the firestorm. It was a hurricane in the streets. Everything was burning. I don’t know how anyone survived.”
Of course, as he dutifully allows, there were atrocities perpetrated by both sides, including the bombing of London, and, most horribly, the death camps, which, particularly with a trip to Dachau the couple makes, the book attempts – awkwardly, to my mind – to link to their own situation:
“But I felt that what was happening between us was connected, somehow, to the things we had seen and talked about in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Munich, Berchtesgaden, Dachau.”
All in all, though, an engrossing read, Clark's novel, for all my nits, particularly with parallels I found with our own time, including, apropos of Christoph’s disallowance of German denial of wartime guilt, remarks I heard just the other day from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who in discussing his new book, “On Character,’ refused to let Americans off the hook for the unnervingly authoritarian-leaning character of our times.

I could not stand the male main character ( and by default the female leads for not listening to her friends and leaving him!!)

4.5

1996, Anna.. a student at Harvard meets Christoph an intellectual architectural student from Germany in her final weeks of classes. They spend the week together before he returns to Germany.
Anna is very taken with him and plans on seeing him again…
She makes several trips to Germany to see him, on each visit they go to many German cities and sites pertaining to Hitler and the war.
In the recent past, Anna’s grandfather had passed and she found a scrapbook with photos from his time in WWll, disturbing photos from Dachau when they liberated it and a Nazi flag he took from Hitler’s summer house.
Christoph admits his grandfather served in the Wehrmacht, and later the resistance.
We see wartime vignettes from each grandfather throughout the story.

Anna is in love with Christoph …Christoph is more distant…
Can their relationship survive the war history shadow?
I was so immersed in this novel.

Thank you to Netgalley and Pantheon for this ARC!

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for this ARC!

I read Heather’s nonfiction book Red Comet earlier this year and I loved it so much. I was so excited to read her new fiction book and I really enjoyed The Scrapbook!

I’m not a big historical fiction reader, but this one was excellent! We have a romance story as well as plenty of history of WW2. I think the way Heather wrote this book was fantastic. You can tell how much time and research she put into it.

If you love historical fiction, read this book!

In her debut novel The Scrapbook, award-winning biographer Heather Clark moves with elegance and insight into fiction, crafting a deeply affecting story that bridges youthful passion and historical reckoning. Set primarily in 1996–1997, the novel follows Anna, a Harvard literature student, who falls into a heady, all-consuming relationship with Christoph, a German architecture student whose striking intellect and enigmatic charm both seduce and unsettle.

Their romance unfolds in clipped, impressionistic prose—dialogue eschewing quotation marks, lending a dreamlike, intimate cadence. But beneath their intellectual flirtations and shared obsessions with German art, literature, and philosophy, runs a darker thread: the legacy of their grandfathers’ wartime experiences.

When Anna follows Christoph to Germany, the novel shifts. The prose deepens, expanding into more detailed, haunting passages as the couple visits sites scarred by war—Nuremberg, Hamburg, and Dachau. Christoph offers perspectives Anna has never encountered, prompting both a personal and historical awakening.

Clark, inspired by her discovery of her own grandfather’s wartime scrapbook—including photos from Dachau—infuses the novel with the rigour of a historian and the empathy of a novelist. While the dialogue occasionally serves an expository purpose, it does not diminish the emotional resonance of the central love story.

The Scrapbook is a tender, intelligent novel that dares to ask what it means to inherit trauma, and whether love can reconcile histories that remain unresolved. A compelling debut that lingers long after the final page.

It's the mid-90s, and when Anna meets Christoph, it feels *right*. Their relationship cannot be easy—he's German, she's American, and to make it work they'll have to span an ocean. But their conversations are deep and the attraction is there and this is a relationship unlike any other that she's had. And: their grandfathers fought on opposing sides of WWII, and with Anna trying to understand her grandfather's experience better, her relationship with Christoph feels like something that can make it tangible. And if Christoph doesn't seem as invested as she is, well. They can make it work, surely. It's fate, or something like that.

"The Scrapbook" takes place mostly in the 90s (Anna and Christoph) and partly in the 40s (their grandfathers). Christoph holds fast to the story that one of his grandfathers joined the resistance, while acknowledging that someday he'll have to find out—and face—what else that grandfather did in the war; Anna's grandfather has a more straightforward trajectory, but not one without its horrors. His scrapbook, the one the book is named after, is based on Clark's own grandfather's scrapbook, so there's an interesting based-on-a-true-story element to part of the plot.

It was kind of surprising to me how focused Anna and Christoph are on WWII—while I may be misremembering, it is not clear to me whether Anna has any real understanding of what happened in Germany between 1945 and 1990. To be fair, she is a product of the American education system (my own American history classes never made it past reconstruction, and I never took a world history class), and even now WWII continues to get a lot more press than the DDR. It's so clear, early on in the book, that their intense conversations about war and trauma are not really sustainable; they know each other mostly in short, intense bursts, the sort of brief time frames where people can hold on to the image they want to project rather than letting the more...maybe not the more honest parts, but the more prevalent parts of themselves through. I guess by the end of the book I was still wondering a bit who Christoph is outside the limited parts Anna sees of him. Not the best fit for me, but I'm glad to have read this (I'm always interested in contemporary fiction about post-war and post-DDR Germany).

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.

Gorgeous writing and storytelling. Anna falls in love with Christoph. She goes to visit him in Germany and he takes her sightseeing, as they discuss literature, WWII, their grandfathers, etc. Christoph seems closed off about certain topics (including his grandfather’s role in WWII), but Anna is determined to be with him.

This was really lovely - the pacing worked well, as did the interspersed chapters featuring Jack and Hans. As much as I was rooting for Anna to break up with Christoph, I understood her choices. Highly recommended!

Thank you to Pantheon and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

For a short book of 250 pages, it still manages to pack a huge punch. With its emotional storylines, rich history, compelling familial themes and characters, The Scrapbook is a novel that I won’t be forgetting any time soon. Haunting in its delivery with achingly beautiful prose, I would recommend it to readers far and wide. Thank you Pantheon Books for the early copy in exchange for an honest review.

An excellent read for any and all readers! Author comes at you with both barrels and knocks you out of your shoes! Great job fleshing out all the characters. I give this book FIVE stars! Definitely recommend!