The Storyteller

I finished this book a couple of days ago, but I’m only sitting down now to write my review because I’ve been busy. So what else is new, you might ask? Well, I’ve actually been busy recommending this book to all and sundry – work colleagues, people at the library, people in bookshops and family. We all know that a new Jodi Picoult book is good, but The Storyteller is fantastic. Edge of your seat, crying, gaspingly fantastic. You don’t want to miss this one.

The Storyteller starts off innocently enough with Sage Singer (yes, she does have a sister called Pepper), a baker who prefers to work alone at night after an accident left her scarred and feeling guilty. She’s in a going-nowhere relationship with a married man and her show more only confidante is her boss and former nun. Her colleague only speaks in Haikus. So when she strikes up a friendship with elderly Josef Weber, it’s a little strange. But she and Josef get along well until he asks her a favour – to kill him. Josef’s reasoning Is that he was a Nazi SS soldier in Auschwitz during World War II and doesn’t deserve to live. But he also wants Sage’s forgiveness.

Sage’s grandmother, Minka, was a prisoner at Auschwitz – something Josef doesn’t know. She has never wanted to talk about her ordeal and hides her tattooed number under shirts and jumpers. So when Sage gets the government involved to bring Josef to justice, Minka tells her story. This is where the most powerful part of the book comes. Minka’s story as a Jewish girl growing up in Poland, forced into the ghetto and then to Auschwitz is incredibly well researched, emotive and humbling reading. Picoult makes the whole thing come to life, and although it can be uncomfortable at times, it is very powerful. It was almost a letdown when the story returned to present day and Sage as the main character.

It is also during Minka’s story that we find out what the snippets of story about Ania (a girl with some similarities to Minka) and her adventures with an upior (a kind of vampire like creature). The story was written by Minka, first as a carefree student and then continued in Auschwitz. We learn that this story has links with Minka’s fate.

Like any Jodi Picoult book, there is a big twist and shock at the end. As I was reading an ARC, I honestly thought that there was a mistake because the characters hadn’t worked out the glaring inconsistency with only a few pages to go! Fortunately, the conclusion I’d leapt to turn out to be true but the question that had been asked about forgiveness (Who can give it? If it didn’t happen to you personally, can you still forgive? Can you redeem yourself after the event?) is left up to the reader to ponder over.

I would say this is easily the best Jodi Picoult book since My Sister’s Keeper – actually, better. This is haunting, interesting and full of emotion. I’d love to see her try her hand at historical fiction; Minka’s story proves she has the talent.

Thank you to Allen and Unwin and The Reading Room for the ARC. show less

Always a fan of Jodi Picoult, I had no doubt about reading this novel. What I wasn't expecting was to be completely blown away and left speechless. Picoult has outdone herself and this book will be hard to beat as my favorite of hers.

I have always loved historical fiction and especially those set during WWI and WWII. Even though it is hard to "love" a story about the horrors of the Holocaust, they have always hit me to the core. This one was no exception. Picoult has a new way of telling the stories of victims and survivors and giving us a different perspective to contemplate.

Picoult expertly tells the stories of Sage, her grandmother Minka, and Josef taking us into their past and bringing us to their present. There are tragedies, show more horrors, bits of hope, and a fairy tale that keep you turning the pages. You will gasp, cry, and cringe as the story of Minka is told. Knowing she makes it through is what keeps you reading and reminds you to have hope in the midst of evil.

The underlying theme of forgiveness spoke to me the most. I've personally learned that harboring anger and resentment only continues to feed the monster in your head and in your heart. Picoult's message of forgiveness rang true to me and reminded me of one of the best decisions I have made....to forgive and let it go.

This was our book club choice for the month and I think all of us could have talked about this book for hours. Unfortunately, we had to go back to the reality of motherhood. But, each one of us commented on how much this book affected us emotionally. I don't think I have ever highlighted so many passages in one book. Picoult has an expertise in telling a story with life quotes and lessons that you want to remember forever.

Without a doubt, pick up this novel at your local library or bookstore and set aside a day or two to read it. The story will linger with you for days and it may even change you. show less

The Holocaust was the genocide of millions of Jews led by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party throughout German-occupied territory during World War II. Ultimately a systematic state-sponsored murder in Hitler’s pursuit of his dream to create the perfect Aryan Race, Jewish children did not escape this persecution and approximately one million became statistics along with two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.

A huge fan of this prolific author, I was quite enthralled when an Advance Reading Copy of this book arrived on my doorstep and couldn’t wait to sink my proverbial teeth into it. Through her extensive research and in blending fact with fiction, Jodi Picoult has done it again and brings us a powerful story of one show more woman’s survival, one man’s search for redemption of his guilt at the atrocities he helped commit and the moral dilemma evoked by a young woman merely because of her heritage.

Sage Singer is a loner. Born into a Jewish family and a baker by profession, she has a scar on her face as a result of a car accident and prefers to hide away in the bakery kitchen of a friend where she bakes delicious bread. She befriends Josef Weber, a ninety-five-year-old widower and former schoolteacher through a grief group they both attend and they soon strike up an unlikely friendship when he begins to frequent the little café attached to the bakery.

When Josef asks Sage to kill him, along with the reasons for his request, she is caught up in her own moral dilemma, consequently enlisting the help of Leo Stein, an FBI Agent with a special interest in tracing former Nazi SS Officers guilty of war crimes, specifically those who carried out the heinous massacres against the Jews in the concentration camps.

Together, Leo and Sage embark on a journey which sees Josef relating his story to Sage, and Leo finally persuading Sage’s grandmother, Minka, a modern-day Scheherazade, to recount her own tragic story in the hopes that a testimony from her will assist in having Josef deported and tried in a court of law for his unspeakable crimes against humanity.

From the depths of the Polish ghetto in Lodz to the terrifying visuals of the gas chambers used for the purpose of systematic mass extermination contained in Auschwitz, Jodi, through Minka’s character, has found the perfect pace for the subject matter at hand and I found myself in a time warp, visually transported by her storytelling ability.

Told in three parts, both in retrospect and present day, with a Gothic fairytale seamlessly weaving its way through each character’s tale, Jodi has written a compelling novel which is at times both gut-wrenching and graphic and took me a while to finish as I had to keep putting it down to try and wrap my head around the atrocities I was reading about, all the while thinking that my high school history lessons on the Second World War didn’t even puncture the surface of the true facts.

Vivid and disturbing, with a brilliantly executed plot, multifaceted characters and some added psychological twists, this is a morally complex tale, rich with authenticity and one which will leave you trying to rationalise the fluctuating line between good and evil! show less

I did not enjoy reading this book as much as I expected to. I usually find Picoult's novels very readable, although her expected twists at the very end of each book, and her abiltiy to ignore facts that get in the way of her plot do tend to annoy me. Anyway, her books are usually easy to read and entertaining, which is why I decided to read this one.
Another reason for reading is the fact that the book was banned in Florida & I was curious to know why. Some possible reasons I came up with after reading: 1. Picoult is Jewish, so she was targeted. 2. Nazi's were acknowledged as bad guys. 3. The book says the Holocaust was real. 4. Life is shown to be shades of gray, rather than the stark black & white, good & evil, which people like show more DeSantis prefer.
Some things I did not like about the book include: 1. The allegory about the Vampire-like creature that Minka wrote was not particularly interesting to me. 2. The fact that Leo, a lawyer, thought that Minka's recognition of a wartime blurry photo of Reiner as her tormentor at Aushwitz proved that he and 95 year old Josef (who did not look like the photo taken half a century earlier) were one and the same, is just crazy. Would that really stand up in court? 3.I knew to expect a final pages' twist from Picoult, so I figured this one out well before the end of the book. So it was a "twist" that had no surpise value at all.
I did like reading Minka's account of her Holocaust experiences and liked the romance between Leo and Sage.
On a side note, what parent names all of her children for spices? (Sage, Pepper, Saffron)? show less

Is it possible to put a Holocaust story, a vampire story, a love story and a tragic accident in the same novel without it sounding cliched or offensive? Jodi Picoult proves that the answer to this is yes and builds a story about the choices that people make collecting the seemingly mismatching threads into a rich tapestry.

The middle part of the novel is almost heartbreaking to read - the story of the Holocaust as seen by the eyes of a young girl that survives it. Even though you know it is a novel and that the narrator survives (because she is telling the story), it still is a very powerful piece of prose. And the fact that it is not a real survivor story does not make it less powerful.

And around this middle part is the framing story - show more the old Nazi officer Josef that decides to ask forgiveness from a Jewish woman. In her introduction to the novel, Picoult points out that this idea is not her, she found it in Simon Wiesenthal's "The Sunflower" and that she built her novel around the idea. Except that the case in "The Storyteller" is a little different - Josef does not seek one of his victims but Sage - a 20-something baker which is Jewish by birth but claims not to be and that lives in the 21st century. Sage has her own story and secrets - while Josef had lived his life hidden because of what he had done and had built himself a new identity and won the respect of the whole town, Sage had her face marked from an accidents and hides behind her profession and the weird hours that bakers keep.

Add to this Sage's grandmother Minka (who is the survivor that the middle part of the book belong to), a married man that Sage believes to be the best she deserves and a Nazi hunter who is ready to discount the whole story when he first hears it but then realizes that there is something in it, a retired Nun, interesting face showing in a bread (and I still do not see how that connected to the whole story...) and a few other secondary characters that allow the story to flow nicely.

And the main thread in the whole novel is choices - the choices that Josef made as a boy and then as a young man, the choices Minka hd to make in order to survive, the choices that Sage made in her own life and for the story of Josef, the choice that Josef had made when deciding to confess to Sage; choices of death and life (in more than one way); choices of belonging and staying away; of betrayal and honesty. Even the last act of the novel was a choice.

The turning point of the novel is hinted at very early in it and is fully shown long before Sage catches up on it - and that's one of the weak points of the novel. She should have seen it earlier - should have managed to process that information. But then should would not have made the same choice most likely - although I am not so sure that this would have been a bad thing.

And where are the vampires? In a story, where they belong. Between the chapters of the novel in the same way in which they had been written between the hard days of Minka. A story that saves her life and that plays a significant role in her narrative... and as unfinished as the life of a person can be. And a lot of the choices in that fictional story mirror the choices in the lives of the characters - and repeating some of the parts during the novel narration itself serves to show how close is life to an unreal imaginary story... and how powerful a story can be.

At one point, at the final part of the book Picoult defines history: "History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them." And that's one of the best definition I had heard. Because at the end of the day, history is the story of the choices made by people for people about people. And novels can relate these possible stories - because even if that one did not happen, millions of stories did happen in the ghettos and camps of WWII - and most of them cannot be told because noone survived to tell them. But "The Storyteller" is not just a Holocaust story even if it contains one; nor is it a vampire story - it just contains one. It is about memories, forgiveness, choices and hope. show less

my first picoult and i was surprised by how well it’s written and how thoughtful so much of it is. i was also really surprised by what the story ended up being as i went into it blind. which i guess is good because i wouldn’t have chosen a holocaust story on my own. and i think i would have preferred if that entire storyline wasn’t there or was much more condensed, as it’s just not something i need to read about, especially if what we’re doing is humanizing the nazis. that said, this was well done and brought up interesting questions. i’m not sure that i like the decision that sage made in the end, or that i agree with the conclusion she came to (at least in that moment) but i appreciate the question that picoult brings up. show more she’s talking about the ordinariness of evil, the way we all make mistakes, the way something can live inside us forever. she’s asking questions about forgiveness and justice and guilt and i’d probably prefer she didn’t answer them for us, but sage’s decision (against the backdrop of leo’s opinion) makes for interesting discussions, i'm sure. i also really always like the book within a book thing, and that’s true here too, especially in the parallels between that story and the flashback story. still, i would have preferred less of that and more of the contemporary story, as i don’t feel the need to read too many holocaust stories anymore, and it felt like that part took up too many pages and maybe was a little trauma porn-ish at times. and the interesting part is really in the processing and the modern day questions that the holocaust brings up. show less

To write about the ineffable or the incomprehensible is not easy, inherently it can't be. So to write about the Holocaust and the toll it took on its victims and its perpetrators...it must be handled with grace, skill, delicacy, if the work is to be taken seriously as a work of merit or true worth or weight.

And, oddly enough, Jodi Picoult does this...but she also doesn't. On the one hand her writing of the atrocities of what Jews, Poles, Communists et al went through at the hands of the Nazis (following the now well worn progression of 'accepted' anti-semitism to slow disenfranchising, and eventual tightening of the strangle hold and finally the knotting of the noose and the lighting of the ovens) is convincing with a refreshing absence show more of the usual pap and plastic flair and attempt at whimsy many American Jewish authors of late have tried to insert into their shtetl/Holocaust/European Jewish stories (I'm looking at you, Jonathan Safran Foer and your wife Nicole Krauss too!). But where Ms. Picoult falter is, unfortunately, her modern American need for definition and declaration in the realm of a story, real in history, imagined in her mind, that defies analysis.

I have no doubt as to the moral ambiguity inherent to all humanity on a good day, let alone during the conditions of war and microscoped down even more to during the conditions of mechanized genocide. And Picoult understands this well. But some, or almost none, can write about things like this with the gentle but powerful hand it requires. I'm sorry, but Ms. Picoult unfortunately cannot have her cake and eat it too. You can't infer a moral equivalency between the few, the individuals, while bemoaning the absolute evil of the many and the majority.

The power of story as discussed here, as confession, as catharsis, as hope, is a powerful one. But this message is threaded too thinly with too many disparate influences jockeying for attention. The conceit of the literary Nazi officer with a fondness for literature being charmed (or at least made curious) by the bookish leanings of one of his Jewish prisoners has been done before, and better I will add, by David Grossman in his superior See Under: Love, as well as, to a lesser extent, in Yoram Kaniuk's novel Adam Resurrected.

But the book has power and the effort and passion shows. Though I should mention that the modern portions of the book, detailing Sage and her (eventual) romance with government agent Leo Stein, are a pain to outright punishment to sit through. And this brings me back to one of my main concerns regarding not only this story but American storytelling sensibilities as a whole, at least, modern ones.

In essence, the story (despite the genuinely surprising and well crafted twist at the end) is too clean, it's too neat, and aside from the relevant and maddening questions of morality and justice brought up towards story's end, is concluded and wrapped up too neatly. This robs the story of the necessary bravery it needed to be a real literary statement about one of history's most horrific moments. The romance between Sage and Leo is too plastic, too forced and 'cute', too much a piece of wistful and forcibly romantic American pap in the face of something dark, ineffable, incomprehensible, something Hebraic and human, Old Testament and brutal.

As it stands, it's a decent and even good read. But it could have been and maybe should have been something so much more than what we were given. show less