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.