Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay - Book Review

Wow, where to start… I’m not really a book review kind of person. Especially when it comes to posting reviews on sites such as Amazon where I buy most of my books due to the hateful (not constructive or debatable) criticism you receive if you don’t agree with the crowd. ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and Jaycee Lee Dugard’s ‘A Memoir of a Stolen Life’ book reviews have both shown me how ruthless people can be if they don’t agree with your review, especially when the subject is a sensitive one.

However Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay is a book that I really do recommend people to read. I bought it for my Kindle a couple of nights ago and since I started reading I really didn’t want to put it down. Even when I had work piling up, the book kept drawing me back to it.

Sarah’s Key starts as being two stories – one is set in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France and the other is set in 2002 – 60 years later. The story set in 1942 is about a ten year old Jewish girl called Sarah who lives in Paris with her parents (originally from Poland) and her younger brother. One night the French Police (yes the French police, not the Nazis!) take her, her parents and many other Jews living in Paris out of their homes and into a camp ready for deportation to Auschwitz. Sarah locks her little brother in their secret hiding place and promises she will return for him – hence the title of the book ‘Sarah’s Key’.

The story set in 2002 (the chapters switch between both time settings in the perfect way in my view) is concerned with the story of an American journalist called Julia who lives in Paris. Her and her husband, Bertrand, are planning to move into the apartment that was owned by Sarah’s parents years ago… and so the two stories become connected.

Julia becomes almost obsessed with what happened to Sarah after she learns of her story whilst writing about the Vel d’hiv (the area where the Parisian Jews were kept before being deported to Auschwitz). Along with her daughter, and her father in law she starts to investigate into the fate of Sarah - a trip that takes her to both the United States and Italy. You will have to read the book (or look at the reviews on Amazon) to find out what happened to Sarah and her little brother as I don’t want to give away the story.

The Vel d’hiv is not a very well known area of history and I think the book beautifully portrays what happened and why the French people of nowadays are happier not knowing about it. I really don’t mean this in a bad way so please don’t take it to be discriminatory against the French. I have always been interested in books that focus on the holocaust but this was something completely new to me too – an area of history that I had no knowledge of at all.

The way the story switches from the past to the present is fantastically done, and it really is one superb story. If you are looking for an engaging read this summer I really recommend that you purchase this book. I would love to hear what others thought about it too!