I really wanted to like this story. I'd heard of it back when they made it into a movie a few years ago. I figured it must be a good story/book if they made it into a movie. I'm interested in historical fiction, especially WWII stories. Again I say that I really wanted to like this.

Sadly, I didn't.

I gave it two stars because it had potential. It just didn't hit the mark. It took me a really long time to read this book, especially considering how short it was. But it just never really drew me in. It wasn't one of those books where I just couldn't put it down.

I had problems right from the start with the author's writing style. I didn't like the run-on sentences with lots of conjunctions and phrases that were obviously very important and meaningful and were repeated throughout the rest of the story and you just knew they were important even though they were repetitive. See what I mean? It's distracting. I did not feel like the voice of Bruno was that of a young boy. I felt like the narration was almost exclusively from Bruno's point of view, with occasional deviances into other characters' perspectives. That was distracting for me, too. I have nothing against 3rd person omniscient, but I felt like the author needed to pick one and stick to it.

Another thing that I had issue with was that the eponymous character didn't even show up until halfway through the story. I felt like if the author felt that this was the most important character - he named the book after him, after all - that he should have been introduced, or at least mentioned, or SOMETHING before 50% through the book.

Okay, one more (not-too-spoilery) thing that bothered me was the "clever" mispronunciations of Bruno. I understand why the author did that, but it didn't really fit. Sure, if these kids spoke English, I get it. But they don't. Even though the book was written in English, these characters would be speaking German. So Bruno hearing "The Fury" instead of "The Führer" doesn't really make sense. Fury isn't a German word. Same with Bruno saying "Out-With." Those aren't German words. Perhaps I'm being too literal, but...it annoyed me.

Okay, several more things are spoilery, so they're going under the cut...

Bruno thinks of his Grandmother often, fondly remembering their performances at holidays. When she died, I thought that Bruno would be more upset. But he barely seemed to notice. The narration says there were sad days in Berlin, but other than that...it didn't seem to affect him.

There was a lot of stuff with Lt. Kotler that wasn't explicitly stated, and I wonder a lot about that. This is a YA book; I don't think that most of the things implied would occur to the target age group. Maybe it was just me, but I felt like those things (his relationships with both Gretel and Mother, for example) were kind of inappropriate and unnecessary. Also, why didn't the author use the word that Kotler kept calling the waiter? Young kids would have no idea what kind of words the Nazi soldier would use. In fact, I'm not even completely sure what word the author was going for there. Maybe he wasn't either.

I find it pretty difficult to believe that for over a year Shmuel was able to go to the fence just about every day to talk to Bruno, and NO ONE NOTICED. I honestly don't know that much about how Auschwitz was run from day to day, but I have a feeling that children were not allowed to wander, with hours of time unaccounted for.

The ending...ugh, the ending. As soon as Bruno crawled under the fence, I had a feeling that things wouldn't end well for either boy. I am pretty conflicted about the ending. I guess it's powerful, but also...I feel like it could have been done much better. I felt like the author could have explored the utter confusion and terror that Bruno was going through. But I guess that he didn't want to be too explicit. He just lingered somewhere between, and it didn't really work for me.

Overall, as I said, there was potential here. I just didn't really like how it was carried through, despite my efforts to like it.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - Likewise Book Reviews

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