2024~12. The Storyteller

I feel pretty terrible about this review. In a time when I think it is particularly important for us to reflect on the Holocaust, the violence of othering, and the horrors of ghettos and "camps" and determining human survival based on the official papers you carry, I am very sorry to report that this WWII book about all these topics is not to be recommended by me.  WWII historical fiction is usually a pretty easy sell for me, so this is almost certainly not why I didn't like it.

It started weird. This is because the story takes place in two time periods, while also telling a fictional vampire horror story that one of the characters wrote.  But you do not discover that is what is happening until really far into the book and it makes for a very confusing read.  And it felt almost like the author was deliberately trying to make it confusing.  Maybe she thought it would build up like a mystery and, to a large extent, I would call it a mystery, but it felt forced and unnecessary.  Yet, if you ignore the bizarre allegory vampire storyline distraction at the beginning, I found the book interesting enough at first and quite enjoyed the early character development that was mired in intrigue.

But even setting aside that problem, it just became more and more complicated as it jumped back and forth between narrators and time periods and between the actual story and the story-within-the-story.  I love a complex plot that makes me pay attention, but I kept thinking that this was a plot strategy meant to hide the ball.  And indeed, there were pieces of the story that were obviously being withheld--huge pieces of the story, like why one of the main characters has facial disfigurement from some type of trauma that most everyone in the story seems to know about and is alluded to over and over, but isn't spelled out for the reader until way past the point that I still cared.  It ended up just not being this big deal after all the hype to get to it. And again, I just felt like it was deliberately being done that way despite it not making any sense not to tell the reader.

Perhaps the most prominent reason for my not liking it was the gratuitous, graphic details of the violence that felt added for shock value.  Not that the Holocaust wasn't shocking and I don't disagree that some level of description of the details is appropriate and I don't want to discount that for survivors the horrors went on and on and on, each more horrific than the last.  There was just something about the way it was written that left me feeling like it was another game the author was playing with me as the reader.  I don't know how we learn about the time period without hearing about the details of the violence, but here it was done in a way that as I was reading I was aware that I was reading this book about this horrible thing that was designed to convey to me how horrible it was instead of letting the story unfold naturally.  In the context of the other unusual plotting choices, I just could not get into it.  So much so, that I had to take several breaks from it to read other things before coming back to finish it.

Not recommended.

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