IRB: Sarah's Key Post #2

I just finished reading Sarah's Key yesterday, and I was pretty disappointed with how the story unfolded. I originally chose this book because I thought it would focus on a ten-year-old Jewish girl and her family's experience in Vichy France, as described on the back-cover summary and reviews. The cover of the book -- which features two young children running towards a beautiful house -- seems to indicate that this would be the central plot of the story line. However, disappointingly, the novel was predominantly told from the point of view of Julia Jarmond, an annoying American journalist in present-day as she becomes obsessed with finding a particular Jewish family who lived in her husband's grandmother's former apartment in Paris. The first chapter was interesting, told from the point of view of Sarah, the Jewish girl. However, towards the end of the book, it completely shifts to Julia's narration. A lot of the times, especially from Julia's rambling, I felt like the writing was stilted and ineffective. The cover was beautiful, the title was intriguing, and the idea was captivating, but writing was at best mediocre and the author's fictional characters were unpleasant and un-likable. The majority of the book was spent on Julia complaining about her French husband and almost every person she meets in the book is divorced. I expected the book to be more about the Holocaust in France, and not the wayward life of a woman who complains incessantly about her marriage.

Overall lesson: really don't judge a book by its cover.

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