Sunday Review

It's been ages since I've done a Sunday Review!

I've recently read two books that warrant a mention--Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay and Hotel On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. Both books go back and forth between World War Two and modern-day, and both books center around the horrors that Allied countries helped to inflict on two distinct races of people.

Sarah's Key spent some time on the New York Times Best-Seller list; I've seen it on display at Target and Barnes and Noble for so long, and I was intrigued by it, but never committed to buying it until December, when I bought it as a Christmas present for Mom. I figured she would probably enjoy it, and I could borrow it when she finished--a perfect gift, right? A book that a mother and daughter can share.

The story starts in July 1942, in the heart of Paris, where Sarah, a 10-year-old Jewish girl, is rounded up with her parents--by the French police, not the Nazis. The incident, known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, is a little-discussed incident in French history that tends to be loosely passed off as a Nazi horror, but was, in fact, perpetrated by the French police. Sarah, in a desperate attempt to save her 4-year-old brother, and convinced that she will be returned home later in the day, locks him in a secret cupboard in the bedroom of their Paris apartment, keeping the key with her as the rest of her story unfolds.

The book alternates chapters between 1942 and 2002, the 60th anniversary of the roundup, which is covered by an American journalist living in Paris. Julia Jarmond is approaching middle age, married to a charming but difficult Frenchman and raising her preteen daughter. They are set to move into her grandmother-in-law's recently vacated Paris apartment as Julia researches the tragic circumstances surrounding Vil' d'Hiv, and suddenly, a stunning connection between Sarah and Julia's in-laws comes to light.

Sarah's Key is heartbreaking and unforgettable, and it was difficult to put down. It's not an easy read, emotionally, but if, like me, you are fascinated by the World War Two era, it's well worth finding a copy. I enjoyed de Rosnay's writing style, especially the back-and-forth between the two time periods, as it made the horrors of Sarah's story jar even more against the life that Julia lives in modern Paris.


Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet takes place in Seattle, going back and forth between 1942, when Henry Lee is a 12-year-old Chinese boy befriending and falling for Keiko, a Japanese classmate, and 1986, when he is a middle-aged man reeling from the death of his wife and being revisited by old memories of the terrible injustice that was the internment of Japanese-Americans.


Ford takes the reader through not only the horrifying reality that thousands of innocent Americans were rounded up and taken from everything they knew to live in ramshackle camps, but also the tensions that existed between Americans of Chinese and Japanese descent, the strong sense of family honor that can cause a man to disown his son for having a friend from the Japanese part of town, and an innocent love between to young children through a dark chapter in American history.

Both Sarah's Key and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet are thoroughly readable page-turners. For those who have a difficult time reading about the Holocaust, I advise care when deciding whether or not to read de Rosnay's book--simply because the story is so heartbreaking.

I read these books one right after the other, and it was interesting to read about the same time period from two completely different perspectives--a ten-year-old Jewish girl witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust and a 12-year-old Chinese-American boy navigating the racial tensions of being Asian in the United States at the time of the internment. Both stories vividly portray how war and its politics can destroy the innocence of childhood, and both deliver profound messages that encourage the reader not to forget the darker side of our history.