The first pages of Tyler Carrington's book introduce seamstress Frieda Kliem as “the consummate turn-of-the-century Berliner” (2). The book tells the story of Kliem's life and death in Berlin, from her arrival in the city in 1902 through her death by murder in 1914, culminating in the outcome of the 1916 murder trial. In painting Frieda's world, Carrington explores the intersections of class, love, marriage, and intimacy in the Berlin of the late Kaiserreich. An early footnote observes that “the nexus of middle-class hegemony and intimacy has largely been ignored by historians” (178 n. 9). Love at Last Sight works to correct that oversight by providing a compelling history of intimacy that reveals the tensions between middle-class stability and the search for crafting an identity in the urban milieu. Carrington does this while also crafting a suspenseful tale of one woman's search for love that ended in tragedy.

The story of Frieda Kliem's adult life provides the structure for the book. The archival record of the murder case offered Carrington an abundant source base through which to uncover Frieda's unsuccessful search for love and marriage. In much the same way that Edward Berenson's The Trial of Madame Caillaux (1993) used a murder case to immerse the reader in the cultural and social mores of turn-of-the-century Paris, each chapter of Carrington's book opens with a vignette about a stage of Frieda's life and uses that part of her biography to explore specific themes: the urban environment for single women, the changing nature of dating and courtship, marital prospects in Berlin, the world of newspaper personal ads, and the law as revealed through the trial of Frieda's murderer. Throughout, the book offers windows into the emotional lives of not only Frieda and her suitors, but also into those of thousands of lonely Berliners seeking connection. The painful ubiquity of loneliness in the big city is an exceptionally well-developed motif in Carrington's history of the elusive nature of intimacy.

A central theme of the book is the tension between traditional middle-class stability and modern innovations in the search for love. Carrington builds a strong case for the enduring importance of middle-class marriage for urban singles. At the same time, Berlin is evoked as Europe's “greatest purely modern city” (19). Its modernity was experienced through continual motion that made established paths of courtship increasingly obsolete. Bicycle rides, crowded streets, urban workspaces, and—especially—newspaper advertisements served as new arenas of exposure and engagement for Berliners seeking companionship. Yet despite this world of possibilities for those in search of love, Carrington persuasively shows “just how resilient middle-class respectability and marriage were to the revisionist impulses of ‘modern’ Berliners” (80). In contrast to the Weimar era, briefly explored in the book's epilogue, the “robust individualism” (174) of urban life had not yet manifested in the Berlin of the Kaiserreich. Gender norms were critical in reinforcing the strength of tradition for middle-class women. Carrington employs Frieda Kliem's life story to demonstrate the ways in which “stability remained the bedrock of hegemonic norms of respectability, especially with regard to femininity” (169).

Love at Last Sight is as much a history of dating, intimacy, and risk as it is an examination of the precarious nature of identity in the modern city. In his portrayal of Frieda's experiments in urban dating, Carrington describes the array of “masks” that she employed in the search for stability amidst the ever-changing and unstable city. Especially as she grew older and remained unmarried, Frieda took to obscuring some of the facts of her life, whether by identifying as Frau rather than Fräulein, wearing a wedding ring in public, or describing a paramour as “uncle.” Carrington adeptly channels Frieda's own efforts to craft an artificial identity into a broader discussion of the ways in which projection and concealment were essential components of navigating love in the city. The art of masquerade is most thoroughly developed in the book's depiction of the growing importance of personal ads in the romantic lives of Berliners. While the ads offered a chance at making connection, they also introduced the sort of risk that was characteristic of city life and would be the source of Frieda's undoing. The interplay of identity and concealment is also central to Carrington's exploration of love and dating among same-sex couples, an important dimension of a work that “seeks to unite gay history with straight history” (6) and does so with some success, though ultimately it is the experience of heterosexual single women that is centrally examined throughout.

In the book's acknowledgements, Carrington thanks his dissertation committee, who advised him that his initial engagement with Frieda's story read like a book, encouraging him to infuse more theoretical and methodological content into the dissertation and returning to the book thereafter. This approach has served the work well. A review of supporting historical literature abounds, but always in the footnotes, whether regarding the viability of marriage for Berliners of the Kaiserreich era (187 n. 90), sexual crime in Imperial Germany (214 n. 33), or the history of emotions and trust (227 n. 9). This structure allows for the body narrative to move fluidly. Love at Last Sight vividly evokes turn-of-the-century Berlin as it builds the reader's compassion for Frieda, even as one knows that things will end tragically for her. Creating suspense in the face of a certain outcome is not an easy task, but Carrington executes it extremely well, especially in the chapter on the murder trial and its verdict. Through the microhistory of his protagonist's life and death in Berlin, Tyler Carrington has provided a significant and most engaging contribution to the broader history of intimacy in modern Germany.