The Electric Hotel

I was tempted to drive down to Dominic Smith's house and shyly leave a handwritten note about my impressions of the book, but it dawned on me he deserves a better reader. The prose is magnificent. I love the silent era and am an amateur historian, but the novel didn't sustain my interest until the WWI action in Antwerp, very late in the book. I suppose that way it's like a German-language sentence. The characters didn't hold my interest, except for the Germans and Reginald Bellows -- they were a dash of sriracha on scrambled eggs. It took some external reading for me to reframe my appreciation. I'm glad I finished the novel, but one unexplained detail about Leo and Cora at the end left me feeling accomplished and not at all wistful about completing the novel.