The Safekeep
by Yael van der Wouden
It’s 1961 in the Netherlands. The war has been over for fifteen years and everyone has agreed to stop talking about it. Isabel lives alone in her family’s country home in the province of Overijssel, maintaining it with the precision of someone who needs the order. When her brother Louis asks her to house his new girlfriend Eva for the summer, Isabel’s entire carefully constructed life begins to vibrate. Eva is everything Isabel is not: careless with other people’s things, loud, late to every meal, and completely uninterested in being managed. Things start going missing around the house. Small things. Spoons. A bowl. The wrong things.
“Order was not the same thing as peace. She had confused the two for most of her life.”
What It Actually Felt Like
This book is doing several things at once and it does them so quietly that you don’t fully see the shape of it until it’s already gotten under your skin. On the surface it’s a story about two women circling each other in a house, which is a genre I will always read. Isabel is repressed in the specific way of someone who has organized her entire interior life around control, and Eva’s presence disrupts that control not through confrontation but simply by existing differently. The tension between them is erotic before either of them is willing to name it as such, and van der Wouden builds that slow heat with real precision.
Underneath that is the other story. The house has a history. The objects Isabel is so careful to maintain, the things she has catalogued and preserved and made her identity out of protecting, have a provenance she has never examined. The missing items aren’t random. Eva knows things about this house that Isabel doesn’t, and what those things reveal about the family, about the house’s acquisition during the war, about what it meant for Dutch families to quietly inherit what was taken from Jewish families and then never speak of it again, is where the book earns its literary weight.
You can probably see where it’s going before Isabel does. That’s fine. The point isn’t the surprise, it’s watching someone reckon with something they’ve been carefully “not knowing” their entire life. This is a book about the stories people tell about objects in order to avoid telling the truth about how they got them.
The Honest Part
The middle section runs hot in a way that divided readers, and I understand why. The pacing shifts significantly in the second act and some of it reads as the book lingering longer than necessary on its most obvious material. It also gets confusing at some points with the perspect shifts but just push through it. It’s worth it.
Who This Is For
Readers who want sapphic historical fiction with actual stakes, not just longing looks like from afar. If you liked The Paying Guests or anything Sarah Waters has done, this is absolutely the move. It’s also for readers interested in the specific history of Dutch collaboration and complicity during WWII, told from inside a family that has never allowed itself to know what it knows.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Beautifully written. A great entry into historical romance.
Tags historical fiction, literary romance, queer, WWII aftermath, Dutch lit, mood: quiet and heavy
