The Arch

by Gary Crask

The Arch is the fictional life story of Austrian immigrant, Charlie Wilhelm. We follow his amazing life journey from its humble beginning in Vienna, Austria in 1918 through his escape from Nazi tyranny to his eventual settling in St. Paul, Minnesota. His life of 97 ½ years, was one of adventure, tragedy, hope and love. As his life progresses, we see the history of most of the 20th and the early 21st Century playout in dramatic fashion. He was witness to two World Wars, a Great Depression, many other wars, assassinations, economic turbulence, the advent of the internet and lots of social change. In fact, he saw more change in his nearly 100 years than any generation either before or since. THIS IS THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE.

322 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 6, 2018

Reviews

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is…fine. If I could rate it in partial stars, it’d be a 2.75. I liked the characters overall and I liked the idea behind the arch theme. I was disappointed in the book though - I didn’t find the story to be very compelling which made it hard for me to want to be invested in knowing more about the characters and to finish the book.

I also feel like additional editing could have gone a long way. There was a decent amount of information presented, then repeated again almost exactly as it was written the first time, and the repeats didn’t lend themselves to furthering the story, so the book felt longer than it needed to be. I also ran across multiple sentences that were missing words or contained spelling errors which detracted from my enjoyment of the book since it caused me to have to reread the sentences to understand them (or made me cringe).