Suspenseful and compelling, Daniela Tully’s Hotel on Shadow Lake is at once an intricate mystery, an epic romance, and a Gothic family saga. When Maya was a girl in Germany, her grandmother was everything to her: teller of magical fairy tales, surrogate mother, best friend. Then, shortly after Maya’s sixteenth birthday, her grandmother disappeared without a trace, leaving Maya with only questions … Maya with only questions to fill the void.
Twenty-seven years later, her grandmother’s body is found in a place she had no connection to: the Montgomery Resort in upstate New York. How did she get there? Why had she come? Desperate for answers, Maya leaves her life in Germany behind and travels to America, where she is drawn to the powerful family that owns the hotel and seemingly the rest of the town.
Soon Maya is unraveling secrets that go back decades, from 1910s New York to 1930s Germany and beyond. But when she begins to find herself spinning her own lies in order to uncover the circumstances surrounding her grandmother’s death, she must decide whether her life and a chance at true love are worth risking for the truth.
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Favorite Quotes:
“Well, in the name of the German Federal Postal Services, we would like to apologize very much for the delay.”… She brought the envelope closer to her eyes. The postmark read December 27, 1944… “This letter was held up, and,” he started to explain, “now that the wall has come down, it finally found its way to you.”
She had always known that the secrets were only sleeping. Now they had finally woken up and come back to haunt her.
“Individuality”— a word that was as misplaced in Fascism as Martha was misplaced in this world. Martha had perfected the skill of letting her mind wander in unpleasant situations. During the incessant chatter about the duties of the German woman, she traveled to the faraway places she had read about in her novels.
She must have been pretty once upon a time, but she looked like a woman who had been branded by too many blows of fate. The bags under her eyes harbored her grief for all eternity; the deep wrinkles were not laugh lines but had furrowed the face in those places where sorrow had constantly contorted it. The way she watched him made him feel like an intruder, the eyebrows deeply furrowed, a glint of suspicion in her eyes.
It was December 1941 and I was standing in front of the building that housed the Office of the Coordination of Information, a name that brought to mind only bureaucracy and moldy folders.
My Review:
After the fall of the wall in 1990, a letter was delivered, forty-six years late, and it meant everything and changed nothing. This book gutted me, but in the best way. I didn’t fall in all at once as I initially struggled a bit with the foreign words used for food, towns, and landmarks; but I was sinking bit by bit and didn’t even realize I had become fully immersed in the story until I was startled by my husband tapping my shoulder, causing me to look up while expecting to see the trees of the Bavarian forest I had just left behind on my Kindle. Gasp, it was brilliant! The writing was superb, I was sucked into a vortex that held me right there with them, in both timelines. I was enthralled and totally invested. The storylines were well-crafted, extensively researched, and maddeningly paced. I was taut with tension and consumed by the intrigue, I couldn’t have stopped reading if my hair was on fire. I love when that happens!
The character of Martha wasn’t fooled by the hysteria that consumed her addled mother and increasingly brittle twin brother during the late 1930s. Martha escaped the disheartening chaos and atrocities within her home and community by surreptitiously reading her stash of banned books, which is something that we fellow readers can totally relate to. The wickedness of the public book burnings felt like murder to Martha, who had passed on her love of stories to her granddaughter Maya who was featured in the present-day timeline of the story.
I have always had a quick trigger revulsion for bigotry and discrimination, and in particular – Nazis. I distinctly remember being a pre-adolescent learning history in elementary school and fervently questioned my uptight parents about my ancestry and demanding to know if I had even a drop of German heritage and melodramatically stating with ardent conviction I would need a bloodletting and transfusion to rid myself of it. If it were only that simple… Nazis were and continued to be – vile. Evil has always walked the earth but there seems to have been an over-concentration of it during that dark and demented period of Third Reich madness. I’m not naive enough to believe the horrifying era in human history leading up to and during WWII was unique. I see far too many frightening corollaries within our current regrettably imbecilic political climate to what occurred in the 1930s and 40s with the systematic loss of liberties, control of the media, messages of hate, and moronic leaders grabbing power. History appears doomed to repeat itself. I can only hope we do a bit better in this century than the last.
This novel is dual time line. One time line is about Martha in Munich at the beginning of WWII. The second time line is Maya’s story. Maya is Martha’s granddaughter and her story takes place in Munich and New York state during present times. Both story lines were very well written but I liked Martha’s story better. I felt more compassion for Martha and the hard life she was facing balancing her views of Hitler with what was going on in Munich during this time period.
When Maya is 16 and doing a study year in America, her beloved grandmother disappeared. Maya’s life never seemed right after she returned to Munich due to the loss of her grandmother who had helped raise her after her mother left the family. Twenty seven years after she disappeared, Martha’s body was found in New York state. No one was sure why she was there or how she died. Maya leaves Munich and goes to the area that her grandmother’s body was found in and tries to solve the mystery by herself despite the danger she gets herself into. As Maya tries to unravel the mystery of her grandmother’s disappearance, she has to decide if her life and a chance at true love are worth risking for the truth.
I found this book a bit confusing in the beginning but once I separated the voices of the main characters, it all began to make more sense. Overall, I thought that this was a well written historical fiction and I highly recommend it.
Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own.
Wonderful first novel. I will certainly follow this author.
A story that is told over the test of time, when people try and move on, live a life that they are expected to live, during times that are not so good to have it all come to a boiling point decades later. Daniela Tully gives us this brilliantly done story, Hotel on Shadow Lake. This story touches so many genres, that it has something for every book reader: romance, mystery, historical, cultural-Germany, and some contemporary. Besides all that it also has a lot to do with family.
Mya is a teenager living in Germany. Her Grandmother whom she adores has gone missing. No one has any answers for where her grandmother has gone to, if she ran away, if she is hurt somewhere all dead ends until her grandmother body is found at a resort in upstate New York. Thus taking Mya on a journey of her own and discovering secrets of the past.
One of the things that I love about this books is the journey itself. First you step back in time to Mya’s grandmother, Martha. Life in Germany during the uprising of the Nazis. Seeing the eyes during a time of such darkness, when all you see is light. The parts of history that we all read about in our text books being intertwined into this story based on true events and facts.
Then when the story leaps to Mya and takes you on her journey to find peace within herself. And her adventure on finding what really happened to her grandmother. Just seeing how such a horrible time in our history can have affects decades later.
I have to admit, the first part of the story is a bit long BUT stick with it. I put it down several times, but once I got to that half way point, it took off and I couldn’t put it down.
4 Brilliant stars
**Review by Lisa, Late Night Reviewer for Up All Night With Books**
(Thank you NetGalley and the Publisher for allowing me to read and review this book)
Hotel on Shadow Lake by author Daniela Tully is about Maya Wiesberg and her grandmother, Martha. In 1990, When Maya was 16 her father and Martha sent Maya to the United States for a year. At the Munich airport Martha leans and whispers into her ear as she departs, “Do for me what I couldn’t”. Maya thinks her grandmother means for her to travel, but that is the last time she ever sees her grandmother, Martha goes missing while Maya is away.
In 1990 Maya’s grandmother receives a letter dated December 27, 1944. When Martha realizes the implications of this letter which could have changed her life choices for the past 46 years, she is hesitant about opening and reading the words. She had lived in Germany during the time of Hitler’s reign and she had experienced the terror of an uncertain life.
Now 25 years later Martha’s remains have been found in the United States just 70 miles from Tarrytown, New York, where Maya had been for that year of school! Maya travels to the last place her grandmother was known to have been in search for clues to her death. The closest hotel to the place of her grandmother’s death is at Shadow Lake!
I did need to go back and reread parts due to the different time periods. In the beginning of the book it is more about Martha’s teenage interactions with her brother and Siegfried and the unrest of her community.
A sad and tragic historical fiction.