Sarah's Key Blog #1

Hello blog enthusiasts! I write to you now, post-completion of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, at the introduction of Sarah’s Key by Tatania De Rosnay. I hope for Sarah’s Key to be a better read than The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Before I begin to discuss the characters, setting, and problem of my new book, I would like to mention several complaints that I have about my previous book choice. First off, I find it extremely simplistic and historically inaccurate that Bruno, the nine year old protagonist of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas would be so annoyingly innocent throughout the book. It is unreasonable to believe that a German boy, let alone a son of a Nazi Commandant, wouldn’t be enrolled in Hitler Youth and be force-fed the ideals of the Nazi Regime. He would have grown up under the supposition that Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals belonged dead. Bruno would have believed that Shmuel was a filthy Jew, and he never would have made friends with a boy that was inferior to the Aryans.

Anyway, now that I have expressed my discontent with the flawed brainchild of a historically inaccurate author, ‘tis time to divulge the details of Sarah’s Key. As of yet, the plot of the book shifts by chapter between the life of an as of yet unnamed French girl who lived during the holocaust, and a middle aged American woman living in France with her family in present day. Thus far, while Julia, the American woman, has been busy discussing the possibilities of renovating the house that used to belong to her grandmother in law, the story of our other protagonist, the unnamed French girl, has been much more thrilling. Our young heroine was awoken by a French policeman knocking on her door, telling her family that they have 10 minutes to pack all of their things before they are forced to leave their home. While the girl and her mother surrender themselves to the policeman, her younger brother and her father go into hiding. At the sight of his wife and daughter walking away, never to be seen again, the father relinquishes himself as well, leaving his son trapped in a hideaway beneath the floorboards, presumably to die. The setting for both of the plot lines is Paris, France. Julia’s plotline’s problem is undefined, whereas the problem of the other girl’s plotline is that she is being forcibly taken to a concentration camp because of her religion. The characters themselves are all quite flat at the moment, and the author is using the writing style of dropping the reader into the story with little background knowledge about the characters.