The Storyteller

Oh my. This book is a lot- in a very good way.

It is "easy reading" in the sense that the dialogue and writing level is that of a beach book. The characters are quirky, but don't appear to be deeply written or considered at first- for instance, one character only speaks in haiku.

But things are not always what they seem, and soon the story brings the reader to Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. We see the lives from the perspectives of Jewish and Nazi characters. The story twists like a knife into a different genre: from "bubble-gum" beach to gripping horror. About half-way into the book, I couldn't put it down.

The book wrestles with the ideas of forgiveness, religion, generational trauma, self-perception, and the complexity of human beings. It has an additional element, which demonstrates the power of storytelling on both the writer and the audience. In particular, the book delves into the terror of the Nazi regime in an authentic and deeply affecting manner.

I recommend this book and will certainly look for other works by the author.

This is a hard book to rate as some parts are excellent and I couldn't put it down in several places. Other parts, less gripping. It's really three stories in one book: Sage, a shy baker with a scarred face from a car accident who is dealing with insecurity issues and the loss of her parents and who befriends old Josef, who just wants to die; her grandmother Minka, a holocaust survivor; and the fictional Anya who befriends a vampire-like creature in the book Minka has been writing since childhood. The book switches between the three stories, eventually bringing them together at the end.

Minka's story is by far the most gripping and heart-wrenching (well of course, she was in Auschwitz, and it's she who is the titular storyteller). The vampire story acts as an allegory for various real life people who see themselves in it. And Sage spends a lot of time dwelling in her disfigured, unloveable hideousness and baking bread. When Josef asks for her help to die it seems as if the book is going to deal with some pretty serious issues about repentance, forgiveness, confession, and atonement. But the end felt forced to me, characters started doing things without explanation, loose ends failed to tie up, and the whole finale felt abrupt and unresolved. It really felt as if the author got 4/5 through writing the book and then the publisher said it had to be completed RIGHT NOW and she was forced to wrap everything up in 2 chapters.

Such mixed feelings... I was completely and totally captivated by Minka's portion of the book. It felt so real and pulled me in for hours. It seemed accurate to what I've heard about holocaust victims and hit all the emotional points so well. I found myself thinking about the victims and the circumstances surrounding the war for days. Sage and Leo's relationship is adorable as well; he's just a well written character in general. Mary also brought a ray of light into the book with her lessons, kindness, and quirkyness.

On the other hand, the way Sage acts at the end, going through with the killing and lying to her new boyfriend to boot, it feels like she hadn't learned anything at all. I felt so disgusted with her after that and I'd loved her character until the last chapter. It felt like, until then, she was being portrayed as a girl with a good heart who had made some self-destructive decisions because of pain and guilt, and the ending flipped that one it's head. I'm not totally sure what message Jodi Picoult is trying to leave us with, unless it's that Sage made all the wrong decisions and refused to learn any lessons. Whenever she talked to Leo she seemed like the more forgiving one of the two, but in the end she makes revenge based decisions and doesn't even do for anyone what an SS Soldier of all people (Franz) did. Tell the truth about what she'd done. It was really dissapointing. Maybe Jodi Picoult was making a point by ending with Joseph/Franz turning out to be the basically "good" guy and Sage turning out to be the basically "bad" guy despite the appearances of the rest of the book. A pointed message about the grey nature of humanity and the complexity of good and evil? Maybe. But it still felt strange and disappointing.

So overall... I have really really strong feelings in both directions