ctowner21 's review for:

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
5.0

One of the best books I've ever read.....review to follow soon!

Read it for my book club. A tough read but so good. We follow Sarah in the past and a reporter in present day.

Sarah is a Jew, swept up by the French police to be sent to concentration camps. She locks her brother in a cabinet thinking they are coming back. She is eventually split up from her parents, escapes, is saved by a man and woman and eventually makes it back to Paris, where she finds the dead body of her brother.

The reporter finds out about this sweep for a piece and gets very wrapped up in it, the history and eventually the story of Sarah. She finds out her husband’s family moved into the apartment, we’re there when she found her brother. She helps the family deal with the trauma, even tracks down her son, travelling to the states (to meet Sarah but finds out she’s dead) and then to Tuscany to meet the grown son. She’s pregnant after a long struggle and her husband wants her to abort the baby. She keeps it but they split up and her and her 11 year old daughter move to New York.

The grown son tracks her down and they meet for coffee and they seem made for each other. She named her new daughter Sarah. They also discover that Sarah killed herself in the car accident because she couldn’t live with the guilt of her brother and everything she went through.

Beautiful but painful story about WW2 and just the effect of everything. Human condition right in the feels