A review by dani_1405
A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This is one fucked up book. Maurice Swift you will pay for your crimes. That being said I think this book is a well-written, deeply gripping story. I think that it is really testament to the writing that we don't get the perspective of the central character until the last third of the book and yet it kept me engaged the entire time.

I also think the way that Maurice's psychopathy develops is fascinating with it starting as ruining someone's career to someone that loved him committing suicide and then to direct acts of violence in him murdering his wife and son. We also at the end then see that even when Maurice is arrested and in prison this cycle of violence doesn't end because he does the same thing he's always done, steals someone else's story, and publishes it. The only odd thing I felt was that obviously Boyne's 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' has been subject to controversy with people rightly pointing out that it seems to drive for sympathy towards the Nazi family who's patriarch runs one of the concentration camps, and in this book we have a slightly similar thing. Maurice's first victim Erich Ackerman is a German man who tells Maurice all about this boy he was in love with during the Nazi regime, he talks about his immense jealousy and the internal chaos he suffered being a gay man in 1940s Germany. We later learn that Erich in a fit of jealousy reported the boy's Jewish girlfriend and her family to the Nazis when the boy he loved planned on moving away with them. While in the book this is framed as a bad thing to do, Erich's reputation is ruined and he loses all future work, yet it is later postulated whether people should have been so hard on Erich given the context of what he did. And while I agree that comparing a envious gay man confused about his feelings and a literal Nazi officer is probably a bit much, it felt like an odd trend to Boyne's work.

Ultimately I liked the way the tension built in this book and also the fact that we mainly got this from the point of view of his victims, I thought that was a great choice.