Prague – The Museum of Broken Promises – Elizabeth Buchan

Submitted: 28th August 2019

What will you find in The Museum of Broken Promises?

It’s true that every book takes you on a journey but this one does more than that! It takes you through history – across Prague and Paris mainly- through various times and events.

Never before have I been quite as excited as I was when I saw the title of this book. A Museum of Broken Promises? What could that be? What would it contain? Who would put the items inside and who would want to see them on display?

Pack your suitcases as you go on quite the ride – present day Paris, pull back the Iron Curtain and explore Prague , then wait until the wall comes down and we head into Berlin for a bit.

BookTrail Travel to the locations in The Museum of Broken Promises

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BookTrail Travel to the locations in The Museum of Broken Promises

From the moment I walked into the Museum of Broken Promises, I had a feeling it was going to be good. A place of wonder and lives lived. There are pieces here, ‘fragments of lives that have not gone according to plan’. It’s through one of these items that Laure, the narrator of this journey and curator of the museum starts this tale…..

Laure Carlyle works as an au pair for the Kobe family in Paris. When they move to Communist Czechoslovakia, life changes beyond all recognition. Laure finds the new regime scary and very regimented. No one trusts her since she is both a newcomer and an outsider. These are dangerous times and people like her are the enemy. Laure herself finds someone close to her working for the very party she and others fear.

Prague before the Velvet Revolution is a fascinating. The city and the country before it becomes Czechoslovakia is a very different yet interesting place to be. Going back in time through Laure’s eyes is both sad yet encouraging when it comes to a love affair. This story is then woven into the present day Paris storyline and it soon builds into a swirling image which at first blurred and then becomes a mix of history and secrets. There’s snippets of Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall too and this adds to the overall ‘ before and after’ picture. The ‘What if’s’, the looking back and making sense of what has come before.

The two timelines and flashbacks are the perfect way to tell such a story. How one person, one time and place, one country, one regime can have such an effect on everything else. During the travels back and forth in time, the history becomes the story and the story the history. Changes happen, meetings take place, regimes crack and fall. Surveillance of individuals seems to grow. Pretty apt when you think about the present day.

The whole idea of broken promises, regrets, hopes and human fears and a museum to hold them all in, was really poignant and was the perfect vehicle to showcase the emerging romance and historical immersion.

The author includes a fascinating bibliography too which makes this museum seem all the more real and its time in history that bit more significant.

Wonderful book and one to savour.