This story is about a German family in New Germany, Minnesota at the turn of the century. Wilhelm Richter marries a recent German immigrant, Magadelena who unbeknownst to him is carrying a child from a Jewish lover in Germany. Magadelena's sister, Frieda, marries a man who publishes the German newspaper in the town. But the story really centers on Wilhelm and Magadelena's children--Benjamin (the oldest and not Wilhelm's son), Herman, Luther, Otto, and the only daughter Liesel who was born with some kind of strange genital abnormity. After Magadelena's death, it is Liesel who keeps the family. Knowing that she is somehow different, she begins a strange sort of relationship with a neighbor man who appears to be mentally handicapped but who has also been raised in a horrible violent family. Lester catches turtles and brings them to Liesel - thus the title.

The story must bring up just about every kind of horror that a family could endure--violent births and deaths, abuse - both mental and physical. Hard German stoicism! The story takes Herman to WWI in Germany. One interesting point of the book was the resistance the German families had to their sons enlisting to fight against Germany.

There is some interesting background to the story and most of the characters are very believable - sometimes just a bit too much happens. Pretty good read. ( )

I didn't even look at the praise on the back of the book when I took it from library's new book section. I just saw "New Germany, Minnesota, 1920" on the first chapter page.

I was thinking if it would help to understand Rosalie in Twilight saga, for her background study. She was born in 1920s, and metamorphosed in mid 1930s. I thought it is a good side reading material.

As soon as I was into this book, I found that the main character girl was born 1900. It comes to not to Rosalie, but Edward.

Now I could see why Edward was desperate to go to great war, feeling left out because he was not old enough to enlist. Government made a great propaganda against Germany, forced to enlist young people, made a good deal at the people who were not enlisted or support the war; all those things were not mentioned in Twilight saga --- of course, it's not categorized to realistic/historical fiction with immigrants. Anyway, it was good to know Edward's background.

It also touched me in the way "Futatu no Sokoku" by Toyoko Yamazaki did. With immigrant parents and American born children, two of their most important countries fighting against each other, people stands separately with pros and cons, government involvements and distrust them afterwards of those who suffered, those were same contexts of those two stories. It secretly asking readers if this country is truly a free country, with trustable government, censorship free society: what can you see?

It left me deep sorrow on the bottom of my heart. Those who could put only two stars or less on this book, are either people with no heart, or lacking their imagination. Or maybe extremely lucky bunch without any catastrophe in the past family history.

I strongly recomend this book not because the story is good, but from American Studies points of view. Not just immigrants, but also women studies, it is good for a side reading material. I can't imagine how many unwed mothers having children and hardly getting help from religious people around them. It must be a lot harder than we can imagine nowadays. And pro-choice was not legal back then.

By the way, I believe the auther is one of Benjamin's decendants. ( )

I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher. I was excited to read it, because, if you know me at all, you know that I love me some gut-wrenchers, and this book seemed to have all the makings of one.

The first part of this book, which is only 26 pages, starts the book off in horrifying and tragic fashion. Even for someone like me who loves books that push me to see the ugliness and unfairness and atrocities of life, I read this part with wide, unbelieving eyes. This part of the book made me anxious and a little hesitant to read the rest of the story, which is unusual, to say the least. I thought, if this is how it starts, do I want to know where it's going to go? But I'm no coward, so I read on, and in some ways I was rewarded, and in others I was a little disappointed. This is a book that is hard for me to quantify, honestly. It's a story about life and loyalty, and the way that things don't always go the way that they should, or the way that we want them to go, but we go on anyway.

The story technically starts with the second part, which takes us back to 1897 Germany, to the story of how Magdalena Schultz, newly-pregnant at 16 and unable to marry the father of her baby, travels to America with her sister Frieda to find a new life and a new husband. She finds both, but they aren't exactly what she expected. Frieda snags Archie Richter, who runs the local German newspaper, as her own husband, and arranges the marriage of Maggie and Wilhelm Richter, Archie's brother, who is nearly 40, and a farmer, and a bit brutish, in Maggie's estimation. He isn't abusive, but he isn't overly empathetic either. So the Richter family begins, and the story takes us through babies (five of them), deaths, war, tests of loyalty and accusations of treason, and unexpected friendship and connection.

This comes from Liesel Richter, who befriends the mentally disabled son of her neighbor, mean-spirited, angry and vindictive Harald Sutter, a man who holds a personal grudge against the more successful Wilhelm Richter. Harald causes a lot of trouble in Wilhelm's life, using the war against Germany as an outlet, and pretty soon, things take a sharp turn from Troublesome Road onto Too Far Lane. Leisel, left alone to care for her family after her mother's death, finds companionship and acceptance in Lester, who routinely brings her turtles for food as gifts. Only when Leisel allows Lester access to her most closely guarded secret, thinking that he wouldn't understand that she was different from other girls, things go badly, and Leisel makes an irrevocable decision, both for Lester and herself.

This isn't a happy story. It's one of struggle and hardships (the emotional kind, not the monetary kind), and uncertainty. It's a story of learning who you are and that sometimes it's not enough to just do what you think is the right thing. Sometimes the world turns its back anyway. Which brings me to the one thing that felt incomplete in this story. Frieda and her husband were accused of treason for printing their German paper with stories from both sides of the Great War, which included showing that there were victims on both sides - a direct contradiction to the Official Story demonizing Germans as heathens and killers, etc. (Times haven't changed much since...) Frieda is arrested, and her husband is subjected to public humiliation, and while the rest of the story plays out, nothing is ever resolved with Frieda - was she released? Was she imprisoned forever? Did she decide that she would make a better martyr than prisoner?

There was a tiny touch of magical realism in the story, which both fit and seemed a little out of place in a story so steeped in the everyday ordinary world we all live in... but I felt that the ending was fitting to the story.

Overall, I can't say that I truly enjoyed the story - but it isn't that kind of story. It has a different purpose, and a different goal. It's the kind of story that one reads to try to understand people different from us, not be entertained. If you're interested in those kind of books, this one may be for you. ( )

Very literary, but not very interesting. ( )

The Turtle Catcher follows the Richter family in New Germany, Minnesota, from the late 19th century to 1920. The novel begins with a terrible event--in 1920 the three Richter brothers drown their handicapped neighbor, Lester, after they believe he has violated their sister, Liesel. The rest of the novel is a flashback--from the mother of the boys, Magdalena, leaving Germany as a young unwed pregnant woman, to her eventual birthing and raising of five children, including the one who eventually kills her, the coming of age of those children in the early years of World War I, and the eventual tragedies of the Great War that rip the family, and the town of New Germany apart. Throughout the novel, Liesel conceals what she believes is a terrible secret--she's a hermaphrodite--and she convinces herself that Lester, handicapped from his father's relentless beatings--is the only man who could ever love her. As the events surrounding Lester's death come to the surface, the reader discovers the demons of the Richter family and their small town.

Although the story in The Turtle Catcher was rich--I enjoyed all of its detail, its complicated levels--the execution and writing style of the novel really killed the story for me. There were times where the language was so dense, and the story so convoluted, that I was ready to give up on this book--something that I almost never do. This book had a lot of potential, and I do think it did a good job of capturing farm life in rural Minnesota at the turn of the century, as well as the political conflict between the German immigrants in the town and the other residents.

If I could give half stars, this would really be a two and a half star review, because the book did have some good things going for it. But I don't know if I would recommend this unless someone was really interested in America before/during WWI or in turn of the century life in the Midwest. ( )