The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. A good book to bring the horrors of the Holocaust to the attention of young teenagers - although I still think nothing beats (the non-fiction) Diary of Anne Frank for that purpose. Warning, possible SPOILERS below: I found this to be a good book for the most part and well written, and while it is meant for younger readers, it is still readable to an adult. However, I have some problems with it. I do realise the story is a parable for young teens, and therefore not totally realistic, but this irked me anyway. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood to read a parable – but there was nothing in the blurb that indicated that is was anything but a novel anchored in reality, and therefore I read it as such. The first is that I found hard to believe is that the nine year old protagonist, Bruno, could be so terribly naive to never realise what was really going on inside the Auschwitz fence that was literally a few meters away from his house. For a norma...
Bookish expressions of a Bibliophile living in Reykjavík