Book Review: Sarahs Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Oh my god!! This book is SO good! I bought it the other day from Black Bond Books in Lynn Valley Mall and it was on sale for $8.99. I picked it up because I remember an old co-worker at Indigo telling me that it was good, and also because I swear I heard that it was going to become a Hollywood movie... so you know, gotta read the book before it gets horribly slaughtered by Hollywood.

From Publishers Weekly:

De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome 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 Tézac, 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 Vél' 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.

 I always found that learning about the Holocaust/Auschwitz really interesting in high school and university and this book really grabbed my attention from page one. This is definitely a book for the ladies, for example, my dad loves books about the War/the Holocaust (you know, dad books) but I wouldn't give him this book to read... there's some womanly stuff in here! Sarah's Key has fictional characters but several of the events are not, especially the events that occurred in Occupied France during the summer of 1942. As the author says, she is not trying to make this a historical work and has no intention of it being one... so just enjoy this book as a great, interesting read. I finished it in an afternoon, couldn't put it down!!