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The Beast's Garden, by Kate Forsyth
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Ava fell in love the night the Nazis first showed their true nature to the world. A retelling of the Grimms' Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany.
It's August 1939 in Germany, and Ava's world is in turmoil. To save her father, she must marry a young Nazi officer, Leo von Löwenstein, who works for Hitler's spy chief in Berlin. However, she hates and fears the brutal Nazi regime and finds herself compelled to stand against it.
Ava joins an underground resistance movement that seeks to help victims survive the horrors of the German war machine. But she must live a double life, hiding her true feelings from her husband even as she falls in love with him. Gradually she comes to realise that Leo is part of a dangerous conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.
As Berlin is bombed into ruins, the Gestapo ruthlessly hunt down all resistance, and Ava finds herself living hand to mouth in the rubble of the shell-shocked city. Both her life and Leo's hang in the balance.
Filled with danger, intrigue and romance, The Beast's Garden, a retelling of the Grimm brothers' Beauty and The Beast, is a beautiful, compelling love story set in a time when the world seemed on the brink of collapse.
- Sales Rank: #12855 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-08-02
- Released on: 2015-08-02
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 982 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent writing and research. Well worth a read.
By Tracy Joyce
This was the first Kate Forsyth novel that I’ve read (I should probably hang my head in shame at that) and I had high hopes for The Beast’s Garden. Perhaps it was going into the novel with such high hopes that ultimately lead to my disappointment with it. While there was much I enjoyed, I wasn’t completely engaged by it.
I’m someone who loves fairy tale re-tellings – so why didn’t I fall head over heels for this?
The relationship development between the Leo and Ava is limited. They almost fall in love instantly – not quiet but almost. Ava is young, just finishing school, when she meets Leo. She is courageous and innocent. However, there were odd little phrases used to describe her feelings for him that jarred with me as being too puerile. They marry out of necessity, though the mutual attraction is there. Once they were married, it seemed the relationship development within the novel took a back seat to the rest of the story.
I sometimes felt the novel was trying to do too much in one book and perhaps this is why the relationship aspect of the story became secondary to the other plot arcs. However, those arcs are great and the secondary characters are wonderful - I loved them. Not all Forsyth’s Germans are evil – many do what they can to work against the Nazi regime. Forsyth’s research is excellent and she interweaves heart rending stories covering the variety of atrocities committed by the Nazi’s.
The writing is of course excellent and there is wonderful use of musical imagery in Ava’s POV to describe events around her.
However, it wasn’t until the end of the novel, during Ava’s rescue of Leo, where the writing actually got me turning the pages rapidly - so much so that I didn’t care about the feasibility of the rescue.
Was it a good read – yes? Could it have been more – yes?
3 Stars
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Wildly romantic!
By Mina
Kate Forsyth is not new to the fascinating world of fairytale re-tellings. In Bitter Greens, she unraveled the allegorical threads of a traditional folktale, better known to most of us as 'Rapunzel', she bared it down to its archetypal simplicity, and on that thematic structure she spun her own riveting story. In her latest re-telling, The Beast's Garden, Forsyth reaches a new high : Ava and Leo's tale of courage and love, "even when all hope is gone", is wildly romantic and utterly suspenseful.
The stage scene is a World War II Berlin, at that time when Germany seemed to be in the grip of a collective madness. The fairytale chosen by the author as inspiration for her story is 'Beauty and the Beast', not the most popular version written in 1756 by the French novelist de Beaumont though, but rather the German variant, 'The Singing, Springing Lark', collected by the Brothers Grimm in the second volume of the 'Children's and Household Tales' (1819). The Grimms' rendition of Beauty and The Beast tells the story of a daughter who marries a beast (a lion) in order to save her father, but to that well-known motif the German writers added the search for the lost husband. In The Singing, Springing Lark, in fact, the daughter grows to love her beast but unwittingly betrays him and he is turned into a dove. She follows the trail of blood and white feathers he leaves behind for seven years and when she loses the trail, she seeks help from the moon, the sun, and the four winds. Eventually she will save her husband battling the enchantress who turned him into a beast and the spell will be broken.
In Kate Forsyth's historical novel, a young woman (Ava) marries a Nazi officer (Leo) in order to save her father. Ava hates and fears her new husband, but she gradually comes to realize that he is a good man at heart and part of the Red Orchestra, the German underground resistance movement that aimed to kill Hitler and overthrow the Nazi party.
Leo von Lowenstein and Ava Falkenhorst met in the dark under the winter-bare trees, the night the Nazis first showed their true faces to the world and the Jewish persecution began. The distance between their backgrounds couldn't be bigger.
Ava is the beautiful nineteen year old daughter of a kind natured professor and friend of the Jews; Leo is a high-bread aristocratic officer of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence.
Ava is dark haired and olive skinned, hardly an Aryan specimen; Leo has fair hair and eyes of a blue as pale as the winter frost. Tall and athletic - if it wasn't for the crooked line of his nose, his face would be the very ideal of masculine beauty.
To Leo, Ava is an exotic flower, "the only beautiful, true thing in a world of ugliness and lies". Mistakengly, Ava thinks that Leo is just like any other German officer, a war-mongering hawk with blood on his claws.
Ava, a gifted singer, frequently joins the Hot Club, a secret group of jazz lovers and swing dancers, mainly Jewish and Mischlings. Listening to jazz and swing was banned at the time as if it was some kind of disease. She loves Hollywood movies and Billie Holiday's raspy voice. Her favorite reads are fairytales and her father's philosophical disquisitions.
Of aristocratic descent, Leo's family owns a castle in Bavaria. His life has been mapped out for him since birth. The von Lowensteins live to serve Germany, with faithfulness unto death. Leo cannot choose desire over duty.
Despite the disparity of lineage and upbringing, despite the dangerous clash of their respective affiliations, the chemistry between these two brave souls is palpable and undeniable. No matter how ardently Ava tries to avoid the intensity of his regard, their destinies and the fate of an entire country are intrinsically intertwined. While the world seems to be irreparably entranced by the imperialistic ambitions of a mad man, Leo's love for Ava will cause a monumental shift in his loyalty to the Third Reich and its Fuhrer. Leo is not what she expected and feared: he's actually part of a conspiracy to stop the insane carnage of Jewish and German lives. Ava's realization comes too late. She has unwittingly exposed Leo's role in the conspiracy, and must find some way to rescue him and smuggle him out of the country before he is killed.
The Beast's Garden brims with climactic scenes of spine-tingling suspense and heartwarming romance. The historical references to the ethnic cleansing enforced by the Nazi regime resonate with chilling authenticity and do not spare the crudest descriptions of the labor camps' atrocities: they do serve as a powerful foil of human devastation against Leo and Ava's heartrending love story. A shining addition to the wartime romance genre.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Heartbreaking and beautiful
By Stephanie Gunn
I’m a longtime fan of Kate Forsyth (I vividly remember stalking the bookstore shelves waiting for each Witches of Eileananbook to be released), and particularly loved her last two books, The Wild Girl and Bitter Greens, and was thus extremely happy to be asked to read and review The Beast’s Garden.
I will admit up front, I went into this book with a small sense of trepidation. I had very high hopes, based on how good The Wild Girl and Bitter Greens were, but I did wonder about the premise of The Beast’s Garden– namely, combining a version of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast (specifically, The Singing, Springing Lark) and Nazi Germany during World War II. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sure that Forsyth could pull off such a story, I wondered if anyone could pull it off.
And now that I’ve read the book, the question: did Forsyth manage to pull it off? The answer is a resounding hell yes.
It should be noted that this book isn’t going to be for every reader. There are scenes set in a concentration camp, and while Forsyth doesn’t linger overlong on any of the atrocities, neither does she shield the reader from the true horrors of of WWII and the Holocaust. If any of this is a trigger for you, this isn’t going to be the book for you. But please, if you haven’t done so, go and read all of Forsyth’s other books. They’re more than worth it.
In the role of “Beauty” we have Ava, a German girl who is training as a singer. In looks, Ava takes after her dead Spanish mother, while her two sisters are blue-eyed and blonde-haired, fitting the Aryan ideal. Ava and her family are not safe beneath Nazi rule. Ava’s own darker colouring puts her at potential risk of being declaimed as having Romani blood, and one of her sisters has a daughter who is possibly learning disabled. More, Ava’s family are close to a Jewish family, the Feidlers. After Ava’s mother died, Ava was practically raised by Mrs Feidler, and regards Rudi Feidler (an out gay man) as a brother. Ava and Rudi are both musicians, and both attend illicit jazz clubs together. To protect all of her blood and found family, Ava marries a Nazi officer, Leo von Lowenstein.
Leo, naturally is the “Beast” of the tale, and it is the romance between Leo and Ava which drives much of the novel. At first, Ava fears Leo, only knowing him as a Nazi officer. As she gets to know him, and see beneath the public mask he wears, she discovers that he is a lot more than he first appeared. Like her, he is fighting against Hitler’s rule, and is part of an underground resistance movement.
The story follows Leo and Ava as they both navigate Nazi Germany and the various plots to disrupt Nazi rule and attempt to assassinate Hitler. We also get to follow Rudi after he is arrested for “subversive activities” and deported to the concentration camp, Buchenwald. Yet another story thread is shown via Rudi’s sister Jutta, who evades arrest and lives in hiding from the Nazis.
On the surface, it is hard to see much hope in any story set in WWII Germany. Forsyth doesn’t shy from any of the horrors: we get to see the Jewish people suffering both in the camps and in hiding, as well as the German people starving as their country begins to bend and break beneath the weight of Nazi rule and the war. But in the darkness, there is light. Even while deathly afraid, Ava finds ways to fight. And in Buchenwald, Rudi plays illicit music, saves others where he can (and is saved in turn) and even finds love.
Forsyth skilfully weaves in many historical figures and events into the narrative, giving a real weight to a book that, in less talented hands, could easily have become little more than a fluffy romance between the Brave German Girl and Nazi With a Heart of Gold, or something extremely problematic. If you’re worried about either of these issues, let me put your worries to rest right here.
With The Beast’s Garden, Forsyth cements herself as one of the most talented authors writing historical fiction (with a good dash of fairytale retelling) in Australia today.
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