This is a dreadful excuse for a book. I wish that Amazon would flag self-published garbage, although, in all fairness, it only took me a couple of minutes to figure it out once I realized what I was dealing with. I suppose I am going to have to add that bit of research to future purchases. I had actually taken a look at the reviews - my, how they glowed! This woman must have a lot of friends and relatives. So why did I actually read it all the way through? A friend asked me to. She had read it and wanted someone to discuss it with. I honestly don't think she liked it much - and wants me to tell her why.
I can tell her several whys, I suppose. Some months ago one of my book clubs read a self-published book by a friend of a member. It was frustrating for its failure to develop the potential of the story material. This one does not have even that going for it. The "story," such as it is, is trite and hackneyed, told many times and told much better. It is the recital of events in the life of one of the sheep of Warsaw, who ignored the warnings to escape Poland and then tamely marched off to Auschwitz. It appears to be a sort of amalgam of many accounts of the atrocities of the holocaust - poorly narrated. And a number of "reviewers" thought it was a true story - in spite of the writer's quite proper disclaimer. I suppose that is a lesson to me about Amazon reviews.
In the book of my friend's friend, one of our complaints was that the dialogue was stilted and pedantic. At least that book had some dialogue. This one is endless narration with no dialogue to speak of. As Alice says, "What is the use of a book with no conversation and no pictures?" (I should check that quote.) It was intended, maybe, to be the deathbed ramblings of the survivor - I forget his name - thus, logically, it would be narrative not dialogue. If that was the intent - the frame should have been fleshed out with interaction with the receiver of the narrative. She could even have done the old trick of starting a "telling" and slipping into a direct action passage. Most likely, she simply can't write dialogue.
There was very little plot and what plot was there was painfully predictable; characterization was weak: I couldn't bring myself to give a damn about the guy - and there weren't really any other characters. Our "hero" doesn't bother to learn the names of those who share his fate in the camps.
A complete waste of time and money. An observation: I seem to have a lot more to say about books I didn't like than ones I did.
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