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cocoonofbooks 's review for:
Sarah's Key
by Tatiana de Rosnay
I'm baffled how this book has such high ratings, unless people have just somehow managed to avoid the scads of other Holocaust books out there and are so emotionally overwhelmed by reading about it for the first time that they can overlook the horribly clunky way in which it is delivered. Seriously, the writing was so bad, both at a sentence level — "telling not showing," so many comma splices — and at a plot level, with soap opera drama in the life of the present-day character, Julia, who as a French journalist is a clear stand-in for de Rosnay herself. (Will she get an abortion? Will her husband cheat on her again? Will she get divorced? Will she ever have good sex again?) I had a hard time caring what happened to Julia, or honestly what happened to Sarah either. Sarah had very little in the way of a personality — she was just a character to which things happened so that de Rosnay could showcase a series of historical events for the reader. I did feel a bit of a pang when Sarah finally found her brother's dead body in the closet , but it wasn't exactly unexpected, and I can imagine that in the hands of a better writer, that point in the story would have caused full-on weeping for me.
It's clear that the author was trying to make two main points with this book: one was educating more people about the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, and two was calling attention to how modern-day French attitudes have obscured the role of the French people in the horrors of the Holocaust. The problem is that the characters and the plot were all in service to those two points (Sarah's story serving the first and Julia's the second), and so the story existed to prop up the intended moral rather than being a fully developed story unto itself. Julia's personal drama was thrown in just to make more things happen in the course of the book, which is why the book ended up wrapping up in an awkward and painfully predictable way.
If you want to learn about the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, read some articles about it. If you want to get a feeling for what it was like to live through World War II in occupied France, read The Nightingale. If you want to understand what living through the Holocaust was like, read Night or The Hiding Place or Maus. This book is just emotional manipulation wrapped in poor writing and excessive personal drama.
It's clear that the author was trying to make two main points with this book: one was educating more people about the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, and two was calling attention to how modern-day French attitudes have obscured the role of the French people in the horrors of the Holocaust. The problem is that the characters and the plot were all in service to those two points (Sarah's story serving the first and Julia's the second), and so the story existed to prop up the intended moral rather than being a fully developed story unto itself. Julia's personal drama was thrown in just to make more things happen in the course of the book, which is why the book ended up wrapping up in an awkward and painfully predictable way.
If you want to learn about the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, read some articles about it. If you want to get a feeling for what it was like to live through World War II in occupied France, read The Nightingale. If you want to understand what living through the Holocaust was like, read Night or The Hiding Place or Maus. This book is just emotional manipulation wrapped in poor writing and excessive personal drama.