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spaceodditee 's review for:
The Broken Girls
by Simone St. James
3.5 stars, really.
I enjoyed this book immensely, in fact. There's a ghost story, a murder mystery, parallel past and future narratives, strong female friendships that are the most important relationships in the book, awesome old ladies, social commentary (especially around institutional misogyny and rape culture), ... I didn't love the present-day protagonist and didn't care all that much about her romantic relationship, but that was made up for by the OTHER protagonists and almost everything else.
The thing that loses it points is that one of the characters is a non-Jewish concentration camp survivor (the daughter of a member of the French resistance, who was sent to a work camp along with her mother). Which is fine in itself--and there was some good material in there about the tragedy of lost historical documentation and the lack of awareness and education about it among the American public in the forties and fifties--but the writer goes out of her way to emphasize her non-Jewishness repeatedly, and that her bigoted caregivers and other authority figures don't care much about what happens to her because they assume she IS. What makes me really uncomfortable about this is that the book doesn't put any effort, whatsoever, into explicitly condemning this rampant anti-Semitism. It has more of a ring of "oh that poor girl, she wasn't even Jewish!" I think this was carelessness--the horror of concentration camps, in general, is certainly emphasized and acknowledged by the protagonists--but oh, it was infuriating.
I enjoyed this book immensely, in fact. There's a ghost story, a murder mystery, parallel past and future narratives, strong female friendships that are the most important relationships in the book, awesome old ladies, social commentary (especially around institutional misogyny and rape culture), ... I didn't love the present-day protagonist and didn't care all that much about her romantic relationship, but that was made up for by the OTHER protagonists and almost everything else.
The thing that loses it points is that one of the characters is a non-Jewish concentration camp survivor (the daughter of a member of the French resistance, who was sent to a work camp along with her mother). Which is fine in itself--and there was some good material in there about the tragedy of lost historical documentation and the lack of awareness and education about it among the American public in the forties and fifties--but the writer goes out of her way to emphasize her non-Jewishness repeatedly, and that her bigoted caregivers and other authority figures don't care much about what happens to her because they assume she IS. What makes me really uncomfortable about this is that the book doesn't put any effort, whatsoever, into explicitly condemning this rampant anti-Semitism. It has more of a ring of "oh that poor girl, she wasn't even Jewish!" I think this was carelessness--the horror of concentration camps, in general, is certainly emphasized and acknowledged by the protagonists--but oh, it was infuriating.