This blog isn't going to be all that detailed. By now I'm sure a lot of people will have read this book, or seen the film and will therefore know the ending, but there will still be people around who are oblivious to the contents of this wonderful fable and I do not want to be a part of ruining this for them.Up until a couple of weeks ago I was one of the oblivious. Of course I had heard of the book and seen adverts for the film but I didn't really know much about it other than it centered around two boys and a concentration camp.
This beautiful wonderful book sucks you in with immense force and then spits you out quite unapologetically at the end. I was left distraught after reading it, though that may have been partly because I read it entirely, with no breaks, in just over an hour and that always makes me feel more connected to and invested in the characters than if I pick it up and put it down.
Up until reading this book, I had never really connected with the true horror of concentration camps. I read Anne Franks diary and found it sad, but it didn't linger in my mind and I didn't feel particularly empathetic towards her or her situation. In primary school my teacher tried to get us to understand how awful it was for the Jews to be persecuted for just being a Jew. Her attempt at this was to compare it to being like everyone in the class with brown eyes being sent away and punished- at that I just thought "Ha, I have blue eyes, unlucky brownies" and didn't really think much further than that.
This book however is scary. It truly brings home to you the frightfulness of the nature of the concentration camps, and, as most of the reviewers featured inside the cover of the book agree,
it will linger in your mind for a very very long time to come. I will definitely be giving this book to my children to read when they are learning about the Second World War, and I recommend this book to all adults as well.
Put quite simply, John Boyne has created a masterpiece.
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