Brida, Judith, Jorinde, Malika and Paula are loosely linked to one another but their stories are not interdependent. I have mixed feelings about this- but recommend to fans of literary fiction.

I picked up this book because of the comparison with Sally Rooney (and, of course, the beautiful cover), but it reminded me more of Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. Sally Rooney's characters are deeply flawed and there is a raw realism that I see in this book as well, but they are also profoundly relatable and you feel compassion for them. I felt about the character's in this book, the way I did about the women in Three Women, I read with morbid fascination, but I don't care enough about the characters to become invested in their story.

I did like this book. I'm just not sure where to fit it in with my planned Book Riot coverage. I will keep it in mind though.

I had difficulty getting through this book. It didn't flow. Although I enjoyed the strong female characters, I did not believe they were developed well. I would have liked more character development. I found the stories relatable, marriage, children, affairs, family, independence, and happiness. But once again, these characters seemed rather shallow and I really didn't care for any of them. I also felt immersed in the drama, without a framework to get there. As if I was thrown into the middle of the story, without the back story.
I noticed in the description of the book, the synapses describes, "women hurtling towards a new way of living, without quite knowing how they got there."
This is an apt description. I felt hurtled into each story, not knowing how I got there.

Thank you NetGalley and Hapervia for the opportunity to review this book.

jb
https://seniorbooklounge.blogspot.com/

The lives of women as they juggle relationships, babies, careers, and each other. While I appreciate the inclusion of five women who are all connected, I found myself skimming in the end, not as interested as it started to feel repetitive.

In “Love in Case of Emergency” we meet Brida, Judith, Jorinde, Malika and Paula. And we read about these five German women as they deal with everyday life. And life’s challenges.

Despite their differences, they have traverse universal issues. And their lives interconnect. They meet men online and they fall in love. They have babies and they abort them. They have passionate sex and they cheat. They get cancer and they rely on their friends. They divorce and they find their freedom. They have ambition and they are heartbroken.

Daniela Krien, the award-winning German author, offers us interesting and funny female characters. We can relate to their sadness. And we can appreciate their feminist perspectives. The writing is wonderful.

Special thanks to HarperVia for an advanced copy via NetGalley. This is my honest review.

I felt kinda meh about this one. Not really connected with the story, even though I did read the whole thing. I would read further books by the author. This one to me is bland.

3/5 Stars

Can I just say I love this cover and leave it at that? Probably not, but I really love this cover and wanted to feel the same way about the book. This is also an admission on my part that I don’t have a magical formula or innate gift for picking outstanding reading. Sometimes, I’m hoping the cover ties directly to the contents—at least as a metaphor. In Love in Case of Emergency this is not untrue, but the connection is superficial. Each of the five women in the novel are at jumping off points in their lives.

Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika, and Jorinde are linked one by one in Love in Case of Emergency. Paula and Judith are college friends; Judith helps Brida; Brida steals Malika’s great love; Malika is Jorinde’s older sister. Author Daniela Krien keeps confusion to a minimum by giving each character her own chapter. Each presents a distinctly different version of woman. There is bookseller, doctor, writer, teacher, actress. They are mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, wives.

It’s an ambitious undertaking as the women pass through a wide variety of life traumas, some greater than others. But in an effort to illustrate these issues Krien chooses to go to extremes with each woman, making Love in Case read more like a psychology textbook. High functioning women, damaged in ways that make them come off as emotionally dead or overwrought. The men get the same treatment except they are without nuance and almost universally unlikable. Again, they live in the realm of extremes, whether parent or partner, they are controlling and demanding, covering a spectrum of fringe views from authoritarianism to environmental zealotry.

Without realizing it, I stumbled into a brief streak of German authors translated into English. On Wednesday I reviewed The High-Rise Diver, and now, Love in Case of Emergency. There is enough similarity between the two to make me wonder if cultural differences come into play. Both are written with a sterile feeling that works in High-Rise because it reinforces the dystopian nature of the story. In Love in Case, a novel about relationships, the clinical tone leaves nothing to bind the reader to the page.

This stylistic disconnect is compounded by the novel’s final lines, which left me completely confounded. They insinuate something that would be essential to understanding Malika and Jorinde, yet land splattered on the page with no clues or explanation. The End. This abrupt disconnection pushed me from mild disinterest to a less-than-favorable impression of Love in Case of Emergency.

I just loved this book. Translated beautifully from the German, this is a character study of 5 loosely connected women, full of empathy and so perceptive. Each woman feels unique and real. Although these could be described as stories of love in all its forms, that doesn’t really describe this novel fully. Stories of motherhood, grief, marriage, sex, ambition and betrayal are all touched with passion, insecurities, disenchantment, toxicity and loss. The writing is simple and elegant, the story is complex and compelling.

This is a Contemporary. The writing style of this book was not for me, and I was bored most the time reading this book. I found the characters to not be developed, but there was a lot of drama going on with all the characters. I also had trouble keeping up with with characters was sleeping with who. I was kindly provided an e-copy of this book by the publisher (HarperVia) or author (Daniela Krien) via NetGalley, so I can give honest review about how I feel about this book. I want to send a big Thank you to them for that.

Oh boy here I go. I was not a fan. I wish I could say that I enjoyed this book but I was miserable. This is a book about five different women whose lives overlap. The first story about Paula was sad and heartbreaking. I did not become invested with Paula and Ludger, their marriage or their family. It seemed implausible to that they would been in a relationship because they seemed to not even like each other let alone love each other.

There was a LOT of sex. Meaningless and risky sex. Possible triggers: SIDs and vaccinations.

I finally put myself out of miserable and stopped reading 26% of the way in. I was dreading reading and did not enjoy the book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher. All thoughts & opinions are my own.

A must read for all women of all ages. The young so as to prepare for those days of waning joy and fulfillment. A chance to see their mothered in colder light. The insight offered here could help women in classes in universities start to decide early if all they have been subliminally subjected to is worth their full consideration or rejection. Women moving beyond the expected. Women rejoicing in solidarity of emotion. Women distinct voices one and all. Women resisting classification. You must read this book if you are female. The best is here and so are we . Whose , funny, resilient.

Set in Leipzig, Germany, Love in Case of Emergency, written by Daniela Krien and translated by Jamie Bulloch, delves into the lives of five diverse women as they navigate family, relationships, and careers.

This is told in a format that I enjoy—a narrative relay where each character has a section from their point of view and the way they are interconnected is revealed over time. While the women weren’t all likeable, they were all complex and fascinating, and their development over time and through crises (and dealing with pretty universally awful men) made this a very intriguing book indeed.

A part of East Germany during the Cold War, Leipzig’s power dynamics changed after unification. Still, these characters, and certainly their parents, remembered life under the Communist government. This was a subtle theme in the book, and I don’t know enough about East Germany or current German politics to appreciate it completely, but I did find it interesting.

I liked the writing and got caught up in the stories of the individual women, though I wished for more about each one, but this isn’t that kind of novel. I do struggle a bit with the take away, especially given the title. Perhaps it’s that love is aligned with forgiveness and can take myriad and unexpected forms.

2.75 stars.

This didn't really work for me, unfortunately. At the outset, I enjoyed the interconnected stories aspect of the narrative style, but I found the five women fairly unlikeable/undeveloped. The plots also featured a lot of no-strings-attached desire and a lot of undiscussed trauma. There also were elements of this that I think went over my head due to it being translated from German.

Thank you to Harper Via (Harper Collins) and the author for providing me an early copy of this work through Netgalley. Love in Case of Emergency comes out April 6.

The story consists of the lives of six women who interact with each other in some way; Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika, and Jorinde. Paula owns a bookstore and is best friends with Judith who is a doctor treating some of the women. Brida and Malika share a love interest, and Malika and Jortinde are sisters. Each woman has a chapter which gives us the perspective of each, but I found it confusing as the time frame for each one goes back and forth. Unfortunately, none of the women have healthy love relationships with their parents, children, friends or lovers. The book does not end with any satisfying conclusion or resolve. I did appreciate the opportunity to read and review this book from net galley, becoming acquainted with another author.

This is a novel where the story is fully enmeshed in its structure. Each section follows a character mentioned in the previous section. We begin with Paula, a single mother, who has been seeing someone new. She remembers when her now teenage daughter, Leni, was born, her husband’s attention shifted from wife to daughter in a way that made Paula feel bruised. We are privy to intimate moments in her life, including her friendship with Judith and the dissolution of Paula’s marriage. The next section zooms in on Judith and so on, until five female characters have been explored. Beautifully rendered, this is a novel about the inherent complications in relationships and it puts marriage, friendship and motherhood under a microscope. This is definitely a character-driven novel and I found it quite difficult to put down, finishing it in a day. I so appreciated the overall sense of interconnectedness between characters and the shifts in perspective. Fans of Sally Rooney and Lauren Groff will enjoy. Thank you to HarperVia and NetGalley for the advanced review copy of this novel.

Interestingly formatted German novel that is split into five parts, each about a different woman who is related in some way to at least one of the other women in the book. This is definitely more character-driven than plot-driven with much food for thought on family, relationships, career, and motherhood.