Blythe's Books 28: Sarah's Key

On the bottom of the cover is a review from Augusten Burroughs that says this book will "haunt you... it will complete you." This book SO did not a) haunt or b) complete me. Instead, it completely annoyed me. I've said before that I like books where I learn something new, especially about a different culture from mine. That was the ONLY redeeming part of this book: I learn about the Vel d'Hiv, which was when the French (yes, the French, not the Germans) took it upon themselves to round up thousands of French Jews, many of who had been born in France, and send them to Auschwitz. Children and parents were separated at camps in France before they were shipped out, made to live alone for weeks and months, then sent on cattle trains to Germany, from where they never returned. This was surprising and interesting to me. Unfortunately, Tatiana de Rosnay insisted on creating a story about a journalist seeking information on the event and a little girl who lived through it to go along with the historical account, and the story itself sucked. Predictable, contrived, and stupid writing. I am not one of those English teachers who rolls ther eyes at the use of adverbs, or swoons at the right word; I love light fiction as much as the next person (maybe even more). But this aspired to be great literature, posed as a great novel, and that it was not. Rosnay felt the need to spell everything out over and over so that everyone got the idea that persecuting the Jews was horrendous. Yeah, got that. Example: "Why was this happening to her? What had she done, or her parents done, to deserve this? Why was being Jewish so dreadful? Why were Jews being treated like this?" And later on the SAME page: "'Your parents are dirty Jews, you are a dirty Jew.' Why dirty? Why was being a Jew dirty? It made her feel ashamed, sad. It made her want to cry." This was on page 48. It got better by page 293, when I reached the blessed end, but not much-- nowhere near what I need to be "completed" by a book.