Sarah's Key by Tatiana de RosnayMy review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
First Reads Giveaway book...expected in mail any time now...Will post review when I get thru reading it.
Received today, 26 August 2008...will start reading today! The only thing I think I am dreading about the book is the fate of the brother left in the locked closet. The rest I can steel myself against, LOL.
This is, I believe, the one of the BEST book I have read in a very long time!!! And I normally avoid books with the Holocaust as even a remote topic. Just because I get disgusted with how despicable we can be to each other.
But this book? I loved it. The author has a smooth, fluid, comfortable way of expressing the emotions and plot lines of this story. There are books that are favorites of mine that are not so smoothly told.
The heartbreaking, heartwrenching stories of both Julia and Sarah are so eloquently related to us that it is just too easy to put ourselves in their place. Sarah's worry about her little brother Michel, left locked in the cupboard for safety while she and her parents are rounded up by the French police in compliance to the wishes of the Nazi occupiers. Her despair at watching her parents being ripped away from her, the conditions of Vel d'Hiv and the move to Beaune-la-Rolande and escape from the camp with a girl named Rachel. The immediate aftermath of the escape is despairing and leads to a lifetime of guilt and withdrawing on Sarah's part.
Julia is stuck in a very dysfunctional marriage to a Frenchman who is rarely faithful and "there for her." She has a wonderful, bright daughter in Zoe, but rather distant from her in-laws, who always call her "The American". Her husband plans on remodeling his grandmother's apartment after Mame' is placed in a nursing home because of Alzheimer's. She is then given a story to research for the magazine she works. She is to do a "companion" piece for the commemoration of the tragedy of Vel d'Hiv. During her research, she learns that the apartment was part of one of the families story, linking that family to her in-laws'. She is told repeatedly by her father in law and her husband to drop the story, don't dig any deeper. She ignore's their advice and follows what her conscience tells her is right.
She finds that not many Parisians, let alone French citizens, are aware of this part of their past, nor are interested in learning about it. She finds it disturbing and commits to researching more.
To say anymore would be to give away too much more of the story. Let's just say that the story is a haunting one. And enlightens the reader to a period of history that is rarely, if ever taught.
Favorite passages:
p.68-69 (too long to type out here, takes up so much of the pages.
p.88
So maybe that's how it worked. That's how all this had happened. Hating people so much that you wanted to kill them. Hating them because they wore a yellow star. It made her shiver. She felt as if all the evil, all the hatred in the world was concentrated right here, stocked up all around her, in the policemen's hard faces, in their indifference, their disdain. And outside the camp, did everybody hate Jew's too? Is this what her life was going to be about from now on?
p195-197 (The letter to Alain from Genevieve) especially the following passage:
Yes, the war is over, at last over, but for your father and me, nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same. Peace has a bitter taste. And the future is foreboding. The events that have taken place have changed the face of the world. And of France. France is still recovering from her darkest years. Will she ever recover, I wonder? This is no longer the France I knew when I was a little girl. This is another France that I don't recognize. I am old now, and I know my days are numbered. But Sarah, Gaspard, and Nicolas are still young. They will have to live in this new France. I pity them, and I fear what lies ahead.
This last passage I find eerily similar to my feelings of the world today. And I fear that my son, who is now 23, will never be assured that our "leaders" have enough sense to not blow the world up just on a whim.
Okay, pessimism aside, READ THIS BOOK! Supposedly, the movie rights have been acquired. I hope so and they movie producers do it justice. I will definitely buy the DVD!
View all my reviews.
No comments:
Post a Comment