I'm reading a book called "Sarah's Key" it's written by Tatiana de Rosnay. You might be familiar with the name because it's now a major motion picture that many people are talking about.
I have now read 19 chapters, it's not as much as it seems, the chapters are really short. Since I already seen the movie I kind of knew what to expect from the story. Every other chapter is about what happened in the past and then there is the "reality", or should I say our time. The book begins with the past, they are in Paris July 1942. Which means that the second world war was at it's peak. From the movie I knew that this wasn't going to be a feel-good book, and 19 chapters later that is confirmed. It's actually quit a sad book, and it's based on a true story. It's about when the French police take all the Jews to a "camp", they say it was a order from Gestapo (The German police), but it turns out the French police did more dreadful things then the German police ordered... Which is why the Frenchmen don't know much about the occurrence or they don't want to talk about it. They are ashamed.
When you are reading about the past it's written in third person, someone else is telling me what happened to them back then. In our time it's written like a diary, Julia the head character is writing about herself with her thoughts. I don't think the story would be improved by an other perspective but it would be interesting to read the same story from a Frenchman that all of a sudden lost all his Jewish friends. We always focus on how awful it must have been for the Jews, which we do with all right, but it can't have been easy being the "accepted one" either. They didn't understand more about what was going on then the Jews did. I mean it must be strange to all of a sudden have a policeman tell you that a certain "rase" (that they called it) is no longer accepted in the society so if you want to survive you've got to ignore and expose the jews...
But as I said, I wouldn't want the book to have an other writing perspective because then I think the book would appear too much as a fact book from the war. This book is still a story, which make the fact easy to grasp and that contributes to a great flow.
Right now I'm at the point in the book where the girl with her family in the past have been at the camp for some days. They don't know how many days because they've been there with almost no food or water and are loosing their consiousness. The girl keeps thinking about her little brother that she locked in, a hidden small room in a wall to hid him from the police. But what she didn't know was that they would be removed from their home and never come back. So the little brother was locked in that wall with minimum water, no food, a flashlight that would soon run out and the worst of all... There was very little oxygen in that room and there was no way to lock that door up from the inside. So the girl and her parents was full of remorse. Would they come home soon? Would their son/ little brother survive?
As I told you before I've seen the movie and therefore I know what will happen so to predict the story wouldn't be fair.
I'm really looking forward reading this book, from experience I know that the books are always better then the movies and since the movie was fantastic I feel that this can either be an extremely good book, or maybe not reach my expectations.... because they are high.
Kind regards
Emma
