Six Degrees of Separation: Stasiland to Sparrow Hill Road

Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate of Books Are My Favourite and Best in which our lovely host chooses a book and participants take it from there: creating a chain of books, each connected to the one before. Seeing where we end up is half the fun! 

This month's Six Degrees of Separation begins with Ann Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. I am not sure how I missed hearing about Stasiland until now. It definitely sounds like a book I would gravitate towards. I am old enough to remember the time before the Wall and the time after. I still remember when the Wall fell, not quite believing what I was seeing on my television screen and yet knowing what a momentous moment it was. I had heard enough stories about what life was like for those stuck on the East side of the Wall, how brutal the secret police (the Stasi) were.

Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Willner is not a book I have read yet, but I do have a copy on my TBR shelf. Just as Funder's subjects shared their stories about life behind the Berlin Wall, so does Willner as she recounts her family history of five women separated for more than forty years because of the Berlin Wall, and their eventual reunion when the Wall fell.

The author of Forty Autumns was an American Army Intelligence Officer whose missions often took her behind the Berlin Wall into East Germany, all the while risking her life. That brought to mind the fictional Maggie Hope, an American working for the British government during World War II in Susan Elia MacNeal's series. She is the quintessential female spy and there is very little she cannot do if she sets her mind to it.

One of the things I especially liked about MacNeal's The Prime Minister's Secret Agent (#4) was the way the author wove Post Traumatic Stress into the novel, a very real side effect for those involved in the war. Of course, it was not called that at the time. It was more often referred to as Battle Fatigue or Combat Stress Reaction. Another author who wrote about a character with Battle Fatigue is Hazel Gaynor in her novel, The Girl From the Savoy. It took Teddy a long time to heal from the scars World War I left on him. I don't imagine anyone can ever completely heal from those wounds. Perry was another character in the novel who had fought in that war and carried his own scars.

The protagonist in Gaynor's novel, Dolly Lane, is an aspiring actress who takes a job at the Savoy as a maid hoping to hobnob with the famous in order to make her break into show business. I immediately thought of Sister Carrie by Theordore Dreiser, which is about a country girl who moves to the city and becomes a famous actress.

Although Carrie's sister and brother-in-law welcomed Carrie into their Chicago home, there was no love lost between them. Carrie and her sister were like oil and water, and it quickly became clear that Carrie would not be able to stay in her sister's home. Sister relationships are a common theme in fiction novels as well as in memoirs. One of my daughter's favorite graphic memoirs comes to mind in fact. It is Sisters by Raina Telegeier, which takes place while the two sisters, their brother and their mother are on a road trip headed from San Francisco to Colorado for a family reunion. The two girls are constantly bickering and have a love/hate relationship that siblings often do.

On the subject of road trips, one of my favorite road trip book (if you can call it that) is Seanan McGuire's Sparrrow Hill Road, the first book in the author's Ghost Roads series, about a hitchhiking ghost, forever on the highway.

And that brings us to the end of of this month's Six Degrees of Separation. The chain took us from the Berlin Wall to espionage, battle fatigue to country girls following their dreams, and sisters to road trips.

Have you read any of these books? Did you make your own chain? Where did you end up? 

Next Month's Starting Book: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

---

© 2018, Musings of a Bookish Kitty. All Rights Reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Musings of a Bookish Kitty or Wendy's feed, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.