VVMBookBlog

When you pick up a book, you can usually look on the back or inside front cover of the book jacket and find out something about the book. Well, not this one. In fact, it says the book is very hard to describe and to say anything would give away important parts of the story.

And now that I have read the book, I agree.

The subtitle of this book describes it as a fable. Dictionary.com defines a fable as “a short tale to teach a moral lesson, often with animals or inanimate objects as characters.” There are so many moral lessons to learn from this book, but they are all lessons for humans, not animals.

Bruno is 9 and he is the main character. That does not mean this is a book for readers who are 9. In fact, the story is disturbing enough that perhaps it should have the for-more-mature-readers star by its title. To appreciate the flow and content of this book, you really should have some very basic knowledge of the Holocaust and the actions of the Nazis in Germany in World War II. Only with some background information can we look at Bruno’s world as he sees it through his very naive 9-year-old eyes, and understand the horror of what is really happening around him.

A key element in the story is the image of the high fence near Bruno’s house in “Out-With” where he meets to talk with his friend Shmuel, the boy in the striped pajamas. It makes me think of all the other “fences” in our world that divide people by race, religion, class or other human factor.

So read this book, but be prepared–it will leave you with a lot to think about. And maybe that’s where the fable part come in.