In this day and age in which the horrors of World War II are being rediscovered in every possible media in this country comes Rachel Seiffert's debut novel THE DARK ROOM, a three-part, three character study of the ravages of war and the ultimately indomitable strength and courage of the human spirit. Everyone is running, some literally, some figuratively, from the nightmares that descended upon mankind during and after the Nazis tried to influence the face of history.

Helmut is a young boy with a strange physical deformity in which his right side is less defined than his left. As he grows older, he becomes a photographer's assistant and spends his youthful days discovering Berlin through the eyes of a lens. However, the war-torn struggles that he photographs make no sense to him, even with his special perspective...

Lore is a teenage girl who travels with her siblings to find their grandmother after her parents have been freed in Allied territory. Sibling rivalry and fighting continues despite the desperate situations, and yet the search changes each of them irrevocably, bringing them closer together than they had ever imagined...

Micha is searching for answers --- his grandfather was imprisoned by the Russian army for many years after the war and no one can tell him why, until he meets one particular informant whose past may keep the truth from coming out...

These three stories, which create a historically accurate narrative, follow the line of command from dire horror to hope and reformation to the aftermath and changed history of the contemporary Western world. Seiffert's prose is spare yet knowing, allowing the individual pursuits of each character to take on a life of their own without any poetic posturing. The anger and terror experienced by the characters at the hands of history starkly bring into focus the complicated emotions and cultural alterations that the Nazi threat enacted upon the world-at-large. It is an intelligent and heartfelt first work about a very serious subject, told through the eyes of people who could be the ancestors of those of us whose families lived through these times. THE DARK ROOM truly is an illumination of what lies beneath those photos we see in history books and think are the past, although they clearly are not.

   --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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