Sarah's Key

It's been a long while since I've had a book review to share (almost five months exactly!), and I have no excuses other than I really haven't been reading. Well, at least not leisure reading; I have made my way through a few pregnancy/baby care books, but I haven't really felt compelled to share my thoughts on those (mostly because I have no experience by which to gauge the applicability and use of the books--at least not yet).

I finally got around to starting a book club with some friends in December, though, so that forced my hand at doing some reading for fun. And I'm glad it did--this is a book that I've been wanting to read for quite some time, but probably would have never bitten the bullet to go out and get it if it hadn't been for the club (the same is true of the book we're reading for next month--Life of Pi).

Sarah's Key starts by alternating between two separate stories--the story of Sarah, an eleven year-old French Jew who is part of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942; and the story of Julia, an American journalist in France during 2009 who is writing an article about the upcoming anniversary of the roundup. During her research, Julia discovers that her husband's family (Paris natives) is connected to Sarah's story, and Julia makes it her mission to discover the truth, no matter what dark family secrets she must unearth along the way.

As a whole, I really enjoyed this book. Rather than being distracting and hard-to-follow, the style of alternating narrators actually caused me to become more engrossed in the book and subsequently increased the pace with which I read the book. I was also fascinated by the story of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup--in all of my reading and studying of WWII, I was unfamiliar with this particular event, which is a testament to the French government's attempt to keep quiet about this dark spot in their history. However, I did feel at times that there was too much going on--family secrets, marital struggles, internal conflicts, etc--and that all these themes were in some ways only loosely connected and addressed. I also thought that some of the character reactions and responses were a little contrived and over-exaggerated, but after discussing with Darrell and my book club I found that I was a minority in that perception (as someone who has no personal experience with many of the conflicts that occurred in the book, I had a hard time rationalizing an appropriate response to the situation, which caused me to be overly-critical of the character's response).

I would definitely recommend this book to others; the few flaws that it may have are not enough to distract significantly from the griping (and at times, heart-wrenching) story.