Sarah's Key

Synopsis
In 1942, the Vichy government forces ten-year-old Sarah and her parents from their apartment in Paris. Before they leave, Sarah manages to hide her little brother in a cabinet. In present-day Paris, Julia Jarmond, a journalist with a personal tie to the apartment, uncovers Sarah's story.

My thoughts
I'd heard a lot of wonderful things about this novel, so I grabbed it when I saw it at my library's used book sale. Sarah's story is undeniably moving, but it's not enough to save this predictable novel.

First, the good. When we first meet her, Sarah is a happy girl and it is heartbreaking to see her innocence taken away so brutally. I'd defy anyone to read her part of the narrative without crying. Tatiana de Rosnay does a good job exposing the brutality of the Nazi-compliant Vichy regime. She also doesn't flinch from depicting the indifference of many non-Jewish French citizens. (In college, I read a book called The Vichy Syndrome, which described how postwar France strove to whitewash its past and envisioned itself a nation where everyone was involved in the Resistance and the Vichy government was run by an unpopular minority.)

And now for the not-so-good. The present-day narrative is atrocious. Julia is an indecisive emotional wreck who's married to a stereotypically sleek, skeezy, hypersexual French guy. Together they have a teenage daughter who acts as Julia's conscience, not a teenager. After years of trying to have a second child, forty-something Julia finds herself pregnant, which triggers her husband's midlife crisis. There's a lot of drama that feels incredibly trite, especially when you contrast it with the other half of this double narrative—a child in the Holocaust, for heaven's sake.

Unfortunately, as the novel goes on Julia's narrative takes over and Sarah's is lost. De Rosnay tries to build suspense by having Julia uncover Sarah's story layer by layer. This is unsuccessful largely because key plot points are so heavily foreshadowed that the reader can see them coming from a distance of fifty pages. Sometimes a double narrative works, but in this case it's jarring to switch gears between the two.

Bottom line
Read The Invisible Bridge instead.

Fine print
Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

Wonder

Synopsis
Auggie has a rare craniofacial abnormality. ("I won't describe what I look like," he writes. "Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.") He's attending public school for the first time in fifth grade and he seems to bring out the very best and the very worst in some of his classmates.

My thoughts
When I checked this book out from the library, one of my friends spotted it in my pile and told me she'd loved it. The librarian who checked me out told me that the library had eight copies of the book and they were all always checked out (I'd snagged the last one off the shelf). Apparently that's pretty remarkable for a YA novel that was published more than a year ago (and that isn't Harry Potter). And now having read it, I'd say Wonder lives up to the hype.

Auggie is a rare gem of a character with an indomitable spirit and a can-do attitude. He's been homeschooled because he's had so many medical issues, and he's initially reluctant to attend school. People have gaped at him his entire life, but that doesn't mean he's used to it or somehow immune to it. His classmates react much as he expects them to—kids say insensitive things (whether they mean to or not) and some of them won't sit by him. But Auggie does manage to make a few friends who overlook his unconventional looks and genuinely like him for his sense of humor and intelligence.

R.J. Palacio does a good job writing from the tween state of mind. It's a really ugly stew of exerting and succumbing to peer pressure, attempting to forge your own identity, and learning to figure out right from wrong when there's not a clear choice. In their own ways, Auggie's friends Summer and Jack go out of their way to befriend Auggie when the prevailing attitude is to shun him, which takes an uncommon mixture of strength and self-confidence. There's a herd mentality in middle school that makes it extremely difficult to be your own person, and it's no surprise that two out of the three kids who act as Auggie's welcoming committee at the beginning of the school year drop him as soon as they can.

One of them is Julian, the child villain of Wonder. Palacio shifts the blame to Julian's parents for raising him to be the inconsiderate little monster he is. He simply follows their example. The scary thing is that I know people who are an awful lot like them. Like Julian's parents, they're French and they named one of their kids Julian. But they're also selfish, self-absorbed people who feel that if a situation inconveniences them or makes them uncomfortable, then others must make everything "right" for them.

The only problem with the book is that everything gets tied up a little too neatly. As much as I reveled in Auggie's triumph over his bullies and his peers' whole-hearted acceptance of him at the end of the book, his story probably wouldn't have ended that happily or that decisively in real life. It was a little disappointing for a book that had had such an authentic voice from the beginning, but it's a YA novel—best to savor the warm, fuzzy feeling it leaves you with.

Bottom line
Wonder has a wonderful feel-good message and I can see why so many schools are making it required reading. I'll keep an eye out for Palacio's next book, too.

Fine print
Wonder, by R.J. Palacio
Genre: YA fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Fast Food Nation

Synopsis
Fast food has revolutionized the way Americans eat and work—and not in a good way.

My thoughts
Is it bad that more than anything else I just wanted to eat the fries on the cover?

There was a lot of buzz around this book when it was first published 14 years ago, and I think I simply came too late to the party to be outraged by this book. The indictments of the fast food industry seem stale now. Big business discourages unions?! Well ... duh. Fast food chains use unskilled teenage workers?! Have you ever been to a McDonald's? They market their evil, anti-nutrition agenda directly to innocent, unsuspecting children?! Yeah, Happy Meals were certainly a part of my all-American childhood and I turned out okay.

Fourteen years is a long time and the world is a different place now—perhaps in part because of this book. There's a trend toward healthy fast food and away from putting Burger Kings in schools. Small, independent farms are certainly still an endangered species, but it's become trendy to eat locally raised food that comes directly from the source. If this book contributed to the recent focus on healthy eating and increased physical activity, especially for children, then I'm glad people have taken Eric Schlosser's message to heart. And Schlosser does raise some very important points about workplace safety and food safety that have not been addressed. Government oversight of the way our food is raised, prepared, and sold is hopelessly underfunded and ineffective. But I can't raise my own food and I have to eat something. So I will simply continue to do what I've always done—keeping my kitchen clean, washing my hands frequently, washing fruits and veggies carefully, and limiting the utensils that come into contact with raw meat. This book didn't scare me away from fast food, either. I don't eat it very often—just a few times a year—and that won't change.

Something about the way the book was written rubbed me the wrong way. The tone was very sensational—look at the downtrodden fast food worker! the victim of horrific food poisoning! the immigrant working in perilous conditions in a meat packing plant!—yet I was unable to connect to any of them emotionally. And that meant I wasn't able to get all worked up over the issues that were raised in the book. This was a heavily researched product, but I felt at times that Schlosser picked and chose his data and stats to make his conclusions seem more damning.

Bottom line
Underwhelming.

Fine print
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
Genre: current events
Photo from Goodreads
I owned this book.