RaveThe Times Literary SupplementAs Freeman’s previous books have included The Meaning of Sunglasses: A guide to (almost) all things fashionable...and How To Be Awesome: Modern life for modern ladies...this is quite a change of subject matter. Oddly, for much of the time, Freeman’s style does not change all that much from the one used in her previous publications. More oddly, the effect is not crass but joyous, empowering and revealing, even amid the horrors that she confronts ... Her book does not focus on trauma. Instead, the Holocaust is like the sun that Freeman cannot look at in her grandmother: what we see are the beautiful clothes; the glamorous friends; the family legends of escape and bravery; and the amazing resilience (both personal and financial) in the decades after the war ... There is sadness here and righteous anger, but, crucially, Freeman eschews the air of melancholy and fatalism that is so often a feature of depictions of the Jewish beau monde ... She thus avoids one of the clichés of Jewish family history and, in the process, throws light on the success of the Jewish diaspora, both before and after the Second World War. In the end, House of Glass is still a feature on her grandmother’s wardrobe, and it is none the worse for that.
