A review by avalinahsbooks
The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman

4.0

How I read this: Free audiobook copy received through Libro.fm

This was a beautiful book. And yet, it took me something around a half a year to finish. I should know at this point that I am absolutely too soft to read any more books about the Holocaust - they just completely break my heart. Not even break, they basically grind it to powder. This is why I kept abandoning the book, and since it has quite a lot of characters, it was a hard one to keep coming back to.

Aside from this (which is completely a personal problem of mine and nothing to do with the book), the story has the same magic and wistful sadness of a typical Alice Hoffman tale which I always enjoy. It was beautiful, poetic, meaningful, and of course - very sad. If you have stronger nerves than me (and if you can handle books with more than 4 main characters), you will enjoy this one.

Naming triggers at this point would be hard because I don't remember all of them, with how scattered my read through has been, but it's a book about the Holocaust, so they are probably more or less obvious to someone who has ever read or consumed any other media on this topic.
There is a lot of death, assault, attempted rape, constant running, poverty, children in danger, family members lost... There's actually even death by cancer. Ah, the list could probably go on.


I thank the publisher and libro.fm for giving me a free copy of the audiobook in exchange to my honest review. This has not affected my opinion.

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