The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

I very much wanted to like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, but I didn't. The premise was excellent: a naive nine year old boy moves from his beloved Berlin to a place he calls Out With, because his father has caught the eye of the Fury. The reader quickly realizes that the boy has moved to Auschwitz so his father can run the camp there for the Führer.

However, once that premise was established, the story wasn't very believable to me. The boy Bruno meets a Jewish boy through the wire, and for a year maintains a friendship with the boy. I just couldn't believe that over the course of a year that no guard noticed these two boys meeting and talking. I definitely did not believe the ending. Without giving it away, I wanted to know why if it was so easy for Bruno to get into the camp, why none of the Jews were able to get out of it.

There are much better books on the Holocaust out there, read those instead. Try Maus and Maus II by Art Spiegelman, some of the original graphic novels, or Friedrich or I Was There by Hans Peter Richter or The Diary of Anne Frank.