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Loading... Sarah's Key (2007)by Tatiana de Rosnay
 frithuswith | Jun 13, 2013 |  This was unexpected. I was expecting a somewhat predictable, overwrought, emotional book about confronting the history of someone's holocaust past. While Sarah's Key was emotional, it was also poignant and completely pulled me in. This book made me do something I haven't done in years, read it in one sitting. Sarah locks her little brother into a secret cupboard when the French police come to take her family away, on orders by the Nazis. Not understanding what's happening, Sarah believes she can go back and rescue her brother. Of course, by the time she does escape, it's too late. The intersection of Sarah's life and Julia Jarmond's in Paris make us confront what we think we know about the atrocities of Nazi Germany. This deeply moving book could have been cloying, and predictable, but it manages not to be while exposing the messy humanity of her characters. (  ) AuntieClio | May 26, 2013 | This story needs to be told (about French complicity and never forgetting) but told with better writing. On the grammatical side, it had too many comma splices. On the structural, if an author alternates narrators by chapter, she should keep alternating throughout the book and not drop the only appealing one. At least one sloppiness: Julia, the 2002 americaine, makes a point of saying that after 25 years in France, she cannot drive a standard transmission, yet when she rents a car in Italy, does not say whether she made an effort to get an automatic transmission. (  ) ljhliesl | May 21, 2013 | Haniah May 10th 2013  msgibson | May 10, 2013 | I finally picked up this novel and just could not put it down! You could read my full review (contains some spoilers) on my website: http://www.rulethewaves.net/blog/?p=2598 ( ) caffeinatedlife | Apr 26, 2013 |
"Tatiana de Rosnay offers a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround the painful episode in that country's history. De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Velodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tezac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers — especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive — the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down." Publishers Weekly (starred review)  This is without a doubt the best book I've ever read. I was actually reading it during finals today, and I reached the saddest part in the book and began to cry. This book touched me and made me think like no other book ever has. Has the adaptation
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On the sixtieth anniversary of the 1942 roundup of Jews by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv section of Paris, American journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article on this dark episode during World War II and embarks on an investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah, a young girl caught up in the raid.… (more)
Tatiana de Rosnay is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.
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Yes, Sarah's story is tragic (if somewhat implausible) and we should remember the terrible things that happened during the holocaust, whoever was complicit. But the plotline was ridiculously predictable, and the characters paper-thin. If there was a cliché that could be shoe-horned in, there it goes. Julia was painfully self-involved, uninteresting and unsympathetic as a character, which was unfortunate, as her story took up the entire second half of the novel. All the interesting questions that could have been asked - what about the French policemen? What about Sarah after her hideous discovery? - were either handled glibly or not at all.
Just ugh. (