Book Review (Sarah's Key)

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

I read this book while I was traveling in Europe.  There was so much to see on our trip, yet I had a hard time putting this book down after we arrived by train to our destinations.  I found myself reading it while Moe was showering or taking a nap.  For whatever reason, I have always been fascinated by the Holocaust.  In Rome, we stayed in the Jewish Ghetto which was amazing, especially after reading a story like this one.  You walk along the side walks and just think about what horror occurred on these little cobblestone streets.  This book is about the 1942 Jewish Roundup in France.  Prior to reading this book, I knew little about it.  The story is centered around a mystery, but the author intertwines the historical piece into the story line as a way to raise awareness of the horrible events in 1943. The reader gets a glimpse into the terror that occurred when thousands of Jews were rounded up by their own, the French, and held hostage and ultimately shipped off to concentration camps. 

Publishers Weekly on Amazon

Starred Review. 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. (July)



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