"It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be, led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel's doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season. Eva is Isabel's antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn't. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house--a spoon, a knife, a bowl--Isabel's suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel's paranoia gives way to infatuation, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known"--

The Safekeep is a novel very much grounded in its post-WW2 Dutch setting and all of our responses about van der Wouden's novel, positive and negative, revolved around that center. The Safekeep looks at how the Dutch people dealt their largely-erased trauma of that conflict using the example of a single house, now inhabited by Isabel as her boyfriend's partner Eva arrives to stay with her for an extended period and a relationship between them ensues. Our feelings about the novel were quick mixed although the majority of us would recommend it pretty strongly. What we agreed on was the van der Wouden was a skilled writer and particularly a skilled writer of obsessive passion, something we have found absent in many authors we have read. Most of us thought that book's plot worked and that the twists were surprising and powerful, although a couple of us saw the turns coming from the very beginning and were less impressed. However, a lot of the criticism of the novel came from two places. First, many of us did not think that the beginning of the book worked that well. Some people thought the novel could have gotten to the reveals faster and many of us felt that Isabel in particular was an unbelievable and extremely off-putting character before the relationship started. Some of us argued that we should have seen more complexity given we were following her interiority, although others argued that she was a believable type and that the relationships was really more about the house as a metaphor than the particular characters. The second issue was about the setting. The concerns that van der Wouden explores in the novel are very specific to Dutch culture in the 60s and she doesn't not spend time explaining them or a lot of the context around them. While this means that she does less to give away some important moments in the plot, it also means that a non-Dutch audience lacks a framework to understand everything that's happening. There's a lot of queer content in this book, but lacking the understanding of what it meant to be queer at that time made those narratives confusing. Exactly how open were queer relationships at that time? What would families say about them? We all agreed that there was no reason van der Wouden had to explain any of this in her novel, but at the same time, all of us felt this novel was aimed specifically at Dutch audiences. Again, most liked the book to recommend it, but a few of us held out on the argument that more could have been done to flesh up Isabel, her family, and culture they found themselves in. Still, NUBClub thinks you should give it a read.