It’s very much a story about grief and guilt. About trauma, and attempting to escape the past. About running, but never being able to hide. But it's also a compassionate book, and Gretel is a deeply flawed but likeable character and we can see how she has been shaped by events.

but to each their own. readers who can understand that this is a work of fiction with specific flaws should have no problem with it. and while i do think there might be some decent underlying intentions with this sequel and, from a narrative standpoint, i found the story engaging, i honestly wouldnt recommend it to someone looking for a novel about the holocaust or its effects after the war. We first met Gretel when she was 12 years old in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, living "on the other side of the fence" at "Out-with" (Auschwitz). In All the Broken Places Boyne imagines the life she might have led after the war and how she would have dealt with her sense of guilt about what she witnessed of her beloved father’s role as the commandant of one of the Third Reich's most notorious death camps. More specifically, we learn about the contradictions in Gretel's mind about what she saw and what she did and didn't do. "I didn't know" . We follow her from girlhood to the age of 92, as she moves from Poland to post-war France, then 1950s Australia and finally Britain. Now a widow in her 90s, Gretel is living in London’s Mayfair, nursing a small fortune and the poisonous secret of her death camp father. German guilt While over a third of English secondary schools use The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and its film adaptation in Holocaust lessons, Auschwitz Memorial replied that the book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the Holocaust”. The tweet linked to a 2019 essay in which Hannah May Randall, the head of learning at Holocaust Centre North, highlights the novel’s historical inaccuracies and faults it for perpetuating “dangerous myths”.It’s no secret that Gretel is the older sister of the boy from Boyne’s highly acclaimed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, one of my favourite books. If you haven’t read it, you must! He sent an estimated 60,000 Jews to their death but, after his execution in 1947, his widow created a post-war fiction of him as a “good Nazi”. It was so far from reality, that the atmosphere of denial and disassociation eventually destroyed their daughter Erika, a real-life Gretel.

And what is this novel? He sees it as a formulaic university novel of “self-involved students who think they are the first people in the world ever to have sex” and in which the authors, “terrified of offending anyone make sure they hit, in each book, all the right things: gay people, trans people, people of colour”. But criticising the book’s intention as a moral fable for taking artistic liberties with Auschwitz, as some have done, is, he says, “like someone studying the Russian revolution criticising Animal Farm because pigs can’t talk”.Tapping into the issue of Nazi perpetrator families and their suffering in the post-war years is likely to be as controversial as the debate over The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has been. The novel is told in the current time with her interactions between her friends and neighbours. New neighbours play a crucial role in how her present life unfolds. In a separate timeline, Gretel also reflects on the years following the war and the events and course of action her mother took to hide their past – sometimes unsuccessfully. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”

John Boyne studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He is now the author of 21 books. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill John Boyne: Criticising a book’s intention as a moral fable for taking artistic liberties with Auschwitz is 'like someone studying the Russian revolution criticising Animal Farm because pigs can’t talk'. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Groupthink was the basis of the Nazi regime; indoctrination gave it its power,” he writes. “In a civilised society - and, for that matter, in publishing - the freedom to express one’s opinions without being vilified or threatened with erasure must be upheld.”

READERS GUIDE

One of John Boyne’s most popular and intensely moving stories was The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and he has taken the step after many years to write the sequel, All the Broken Places. It must have weighed on his mind if he could maintain the legacy of such an admired and deeply profound story. Holocaust stories, especially fiction, are responsible for paying respect to the emotionality of characters and delicately navigating a tale that never reduces the impact of the horrendous crimes committed. His expression was one that I had seen before, when I was a child and living in that other place. The soldiers had worn it, almost to a man. A desire to hurt. An awareness that there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. It was mesmerizing. I could not look away and nor, it seemed, could he.”

All the Broken Places is a sequel to Boyne's 2006 book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and follows the now 91-year-old older sister of Bruno from that book, Gretel. Gretel has lived in London for decades, never speaking of her childhood in Nazi Germany as the daughter of a concentration camp commandant. Her life is upended when a new family moves in next door whose circumstances force her to confront her own past. [1] Plot [ edit ] Devlin, Martina (2022-09-22). "All The Broken Places by John Boyne: A sister's lifetime in the shadow of the death camps". Irish Independent . Retrieved 2023-01-09.

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All the Broken Places jumps between the past, in which Gretel and her mother escape from Nazi Germany and attempt to rebuild their lives in a world with very good reason to hate them, and the present, in which ninety-on