Hotel on Shadow Lake by Daniela Tully

Hotel on Shadow Lake by Daniela Tully
Published by Thomas Dunne Books ISBN 9781250126962
Hardcover, $26.99, 245 pages

Daniela Tully's debut novel, Hotel on Shadow Lake, takes place in more than a few timelines. It begins with in 1990 with an older German woman, Martha Weisberg, receiving a letter from the postman- a letter from 1944. Now that the wall has come down in Berlin, many people have letters delivered to them that just disappeared after the war, and Martha is one of them. (Tully's family actually received one of these letters, the inspiration for her novel.)

The letter is from her twin brother Wolfgang, who died at the end of the war. Martha doesn't want to open the letter, afraid of what may be inside it.

We then turn to 1938 Germany, where Martha lives with her mother and brother, having lost a sister and her father. Wolfgang is becoming more involved in the Nazi party, something that Martha knows her father would be saddened by if he were still alive.

Wolfgang has become friends with Siegfried, another man who believes deeply in the Nazi party and Hitler's rise. They go to the many Nazi rallies and are swept up in the horrible acts that are the beginnings of the atrocities that the Nazis inflict on anyone not throught to be of pure Aryan blood.

In 2017, Martha's granddaughter Maya receives word from her father that the remains of her missing grandmother Martha have been found- in the United States, about an hour away from where Maya studied abroad in 1990.

Martha disappeared in 1990, and no one knew that she had even gone to the United States. Her remains were found in a landslide near a popular resort in the Catskill Mountains in New York State. The Montgomery Preserve Resort has been owned by the Montgomery family for generations, and it has been visited by presidents and wealthy people for many years.

Maya goes to New York and begins snooping around to find out what brought her grandmother to this place, and she gets caught up in secret history of the Montgomery family. She is determined to discover what exactly happened to her grandmother- was it an accident or was she murdered?

One of the reasons I really enjoyed Hotel on Shadow Lake is that the Montgomery Resort is physically closely based on Mohonk Mountain House in the Catskills, a place that my husband worked at when he was in college. The author has vividly recreated the place for the setting of her story, and if you have ever been there, you will recognize it immediately. It is an important character in the story.

There is a lot going on in the story, with multiple timelines and characters, and Tully skillfully weaves them together to create an enthralling story, one that kept me turning the pages. Many times a book will be either character-driven or plot-driven, but Tully has managed to combine the two in writing a story that will keep you guessing until the very end. I highly recommend Hotel on Shadow Lake.

Thanks to TLC Tours for putting me on Daniela Tully's tour. The rest of her stops are here:

Daniela Tully’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Tuesday, August 7th: @ladyofthelibrary

Wednesday, August 8th: Write Read Life

Thursday, August 9th: Laura’s Reviews

Friday, August 10th: @jennblogsbooks

Saturday, August 11th: Books & Bindings

Monday, August 13th: Diary of a Stay at Home Mom

Wednesday, August 15th: From the TBR Pile

Monday, August 20th: @booksncatsncoffee

Tuesday, August 21st: Cheryl’s Book Nook

Monday, August 27th: bookchickdi

Tuesday, August 28th: Savvy Verse and Wit

Wednesday, August 29th: Girl Who Reads

Thursday, August 30th: @hotcocoareads

Friday, August 31st: Mystery Suspense Reviews

Tuesday, September 4th: Kahakai Kitchen

TBD: @thats_what_she_read

TBD: A Chick Who Reads

TBD: What is That Book About

Mad Women by Jane Maas

Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond by Jane Maas
Published by Thomas Dunne Books ISBN 978-0-312-64023-1
Hardcover, $24.99

If you want to get in the mood for the return of Mad Men this Sunday, pick up a copy of Jane Maas' memoir of life on Madison Ave. in the 1960s.  She is a real-life Peggy Olson, who worked her way up the ladder from copywriter to creative director to eventually owner of her own advertising agency.

Maas worked for advertising guru David Ogilvy at his agency, and her descriptions of life on Madison Avenue-the constant cigarette smoking, drinking at work and office sex- validate the writers of Mad Men. She has some amusing anecdotes, but as one of the few working mothers at Ogilvy, her observations about working when most of the other moms stayed home with their children are informative. Her older daughter, four years senior to the younger daughter, recalled all the things her mother missed, but the younger daughter was proud to have a working mom.

Jane's husband Michael was an enlightened man who fully supported his wife's career. And then there is Mabel, the woman who lived with the family during the week and cared for the children and the household. Without Mabel, Jane would not have been able to have a career. What did working mothers who did not have the money to afford a caretaker do back then? Daycare was not an option.

Maas interviewed other women who worked in advertising to get their observations. One thing I found interesting was that at one agency, when the women got promoted from secretary to copywriter, they started wearing their hats in the office- all day. It was "a badge. It proclaimed that you were no longer a secretary."  The male copywriters had their own private dining room, but the women couldn't eat there. They were served lunch at their desks by their secretaries. And they ate with their hats on.

Maas was a key person on one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever, the I Love New York campaign. I found this section of the book utterly fascinating. Maas worked closely with Governor Hugh Carey, and he was so impressed with her work, he asked her to plan his wedding, although she had never done anything like that before.

Leona Helmsley, the so-called Queen of Mean, offers to back Maas in an agency of her own, and that turns out to be a big mistake. Helmsley offers to introduce Maas to her important friends and to help make her agency a huge success, but in the end, she treated Maas as poorly as she treated most people who worked for her. Helmsley is larger-than-life and not in a good way. Let's just say everything you have ever heard about her is true and then some.

Mad Women is a fabulous look at what it was like to work in a mostly-male domain of advertising in the 1960s. Maas is a terrific writer, and being a copywriter, she knows how to say a lot with a few words, and make those few words have a punch. It's the perfect book to get you in the mood for the start of season five of Mad Men.

rating 4 of 5 stars