
Please note that I DNF this book at 40 percent. I should have called it at 10 percent actually because this book was a struggle for me to even get into from the start.
I managed the Good Anna's story in this book and started to read Melanchta and had to quit.
The Good Anna storyline was about a German housekeeper. I found it to be repetitive and the constant reusing of the word "good" everywhere almost killed me. Reading about what made Anna the "Good Anna" just felt like I was reading a how to manual. There was no color to anything. It was the Good Anna did X and the Good Anna did Y. Stein tries to talk about Anna's background a bit to explain her, but I just felt bored throughout it.
Melanchta dealt with a young woman who had a black father and a mixed race mother. I have no idea where Stein was going in this story since I quit after I started to notice a lot of what I considered racist commentary about "Negroes" in the book. I have no idea if Stein was trying to talk about what she saw as an issue that white Americans had towards blacks or mixed race people at time, or if this is what she really felt, either way I was not in the mood for it and just DNFed after I got to this point.