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As regular readers of this blog know, I’m contrary about a lot of things, but particularly when my ‘non reading’ friends recommend a book. I resist, I balk, I dig in my heels until either one of two things happens a) someone literally puts the book in my hands and says “READ IT!” or b) a ‘real’ reading friend recommends it. If neither of these two things happen I simple become of those people who appear behind the times, but is secretly sitting smugly and patting myself on the back for not following the crowd. Of course, as I’ve acknowledged before, this kind of thinking is potentially dangerous, since I would miss some amazing reading. And really, who am I to judge what other people are reading? At least people still are reading, even if it is on an e-reader (don’t get me started there. . .). Sometimes, like now, when I’m too tired and dazed to concentrate, easy reading, good reading, fun reading is exactly what is needed.
Like the rest of the world I’d been hearing about Sarah’s Key everywhere. Lots of people I knew had read it and were lauding it, but these were all the same people who read Water for Elephants (full disclosure, I read that too, but in hardcover, before everyone was mad about it and before that Twilight guy made a movie of it). My mother, the mother-of-all-readers, brought it over and put it on my shelf without so much as a comment (apparently option c to get me to read something). I found it after I spent three days enthralled with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and needed some fiction. However I wouldn’t call this book, a story about the Holocaust, easy nor fun, but it was in so many aspects, very very good.
Sometimes, while reading a good book I hear a buzzing, needling little voice floating around in the back of the mind. Every time I try to capture it, it quickly dissolves away. But it’s persistent and it generally ruins what would otherwise be a great reading experience.
I’ve spent the past two days completely riveted by this poignant and vivid story of a young Jewish girl and her brother. Newly christened Hansel and Gretel, they are abandoned by their stepmother and father in the woods of Poland. Their journey toward survival is so heartbreaking and so real that I found myself wrapped in a blanket in my warm armchair, still shivering along with these two cold children hidden under leaves and snow.
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