Quite honestly I can’t stand only a few books that I’ve read, recently The Awakening by Nora Roberts.
Holy crap, do I reallllyyyyy want my money back. I was bored. So. Bored. The magic system was subpar, the characters just….ew, everything was so, so boring. The MC is an idiot.
What book is a zero star read for you?
The Boy in the Stopped Pyjamas. It’s basically Holocaust fan fiction. The whole book just kinda treats the concentration camps with a levity that just feels disrespectful. Also the main character is dumbest 9year old ever to exist. I actually know people who read this book as a class in school. I don’t know why with the plethora of literature about the Holocaust, many of it written by actual survivors, that only school would choose The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas to read as a class
we had to read it for english class and then were forced to watch the movie in history class after we finished reading as a class, and this was sixth grade so although i understand they were trying to teach us the horrors of what happened, it was very traumatic for an eleven year old 🥴
The only good thing about that book was the ending. Seriously, fuck that stupid ass kid.
I read this book in a college class on the Holocaust. Like, what?! It’s so ridiculously inaccurate and inappropriate
Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou! I felt like the only one who hated this! This and the Life of Pi for somewhat similar reasons as I can’t stand when an author thinks they have this brilliant plot twist and it reads so smugly as if their intelligence is twice that of the readers. I also hate when people think that using something as horrific as war/ concentration camps/ horrific violence as some kind of interesting or novel way to make their twist more poetic/ juicier/ avant- guard…. And it shows that they have never really undergone anything close to resembling hardship in their lives and have a sort of rubbernecking at a roadside fatality to gossip about what they saw later with glee vibe. Gross
Holocaust Porn.
Isn’t the levity the point of the book? It’s from the perspective of a kid who essentially thinks his dad runs some kind of holiday camp.
Problem is that that misunderstanding is extremely unrealistic. The Nazis heavily indoctrinated children, especially those of their officers. If the story had been reality, Bruno would have been told that inside the camps are “the enemies”.
It’s a serious topic and he tries to write a serious story about it. That makes it especially problematic when important historical facts are missing, misunderstood or changed (for example, you couldn’t just sneak into Auschwitz and a kid in Auschwitz wouldn’t have been sitting around to talk to Bruno in the first place), because people inherently assume that someone writing about this serious topic in a serious way did their research.
I’m also not sure if there’s any way to have a story about the Holocaust that has levity? But I guess that’s a different conversation.
Holocaust Porn.
Completely agree. The whole “tragedy” is built around the idea that while millions of meaningless people were being slaughtered, isn’t it sad that a “real” child was caught up in the conflict. Really terrible.
Lmao spot on, we had to read it in school
Also the author lifted a recipe for dye from the Legend of Zelda. So in the middle of a book about the holocaust there’s Hylian shrooms and tails of the red lizafos.
The movie sucked and the author wrote another pulp history fiction with accidental legend of zelda content he googled by mistake
Does he not use editors?
The movie sucked and the author wrote another pulp history fiction with accidental legend of zelda content he googled by mistake
Isn’t the levity the point of the book? It’s from the perspective of a kid who essentially thinks his dad runs some kind of holiday camp.
Also the author lifted a recipe for dye from the Legend of Zelda. So in the middle of a book about the holocaust there’s Hylian shrooms and tails of the red lizafos.
Yes I’m baffled why that book is so well known and not The Devils Arithmetic for example (same age range).
I haven’t read the book, but I have a couple questions about your review:
What differentiates this book from historical fiction about the Holocaust?
Is it the author treat the camps with levity, or could it be just the narrator? Is it seen through a child’s eye, as an unreliable narrator who is too naive to understand the camps for what they are?
I haven’t read the book, but I have a couple questions about your review:
What differentiates this book from historical fiction about the Holocaust?
Is it the author treat the camps with levity, or could it be just the narrator? Is it seen through a child’s eye, as an unreliable narrator who is too naive to understand the camps for what they are?
Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou! I felt like the only one who hated this! This and the Life of Pi for somewhat similar reasons as I can’t stand when an author thinks they have this brilliant plot twist and it reads so smugly as if their intelligence is twice that of the readers. I also hate when people think that using something as horrific as war/ concentration camps/ horrific violence as some kind of interesting or novel way to make their twist more poetic/ juicier/ avant- guard…. And it shows that they have never really undergone anything close to resembling hardship in their lives and have a sort of rubbernecking at a roadside fatality to gossip about what they saw later with glee vibe. Gross
All of this is why I hated the movie “Life is Beautiful” with a vengeance. An insult to the victims.
Was Life of Pi that bad?
It touts itself as waaay deeper than it is to most people.
Thank you! A friend gave me The Life of Pi for Christmas with a handwritten note saying how it changed her life. Why? How? What? I hated that book.
I went to a reading by the author of Life of Pi once and can confirm he is a smug prick who thinks he’s infinitely more intelligent than his readers.