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This is an unfortunate book, and I regret buying it for my son as a complement to a class novel he recently read in school, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.Spending some time reading it myself now, after seeing the strange perception of history my son developed reading the above-mentioned Holocaust "fable" in school, I have decided I won't let him read this until he is old enough to discern the blatant mistakes, idiotic language, voyeuristic sensationalism, namedropping and Disneyfication of a ti...
Oh boy......THE BOY AT THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN......really surprised me.1936 - Pierrot is such a good kid....at age seven, he doesn't even know the meaning of the word prejudice or hatred with a French mom, German pop and Jewish best buddy, but life as he knows it is soon turned upside down when he is orphaned and finds himself traveling alone by train from Paris to Austria to live with an aunt he has never met.Meeting up with bullies....both young and old along the way....a naive Pierrot finds
“Just don't ever tell yourself that you didn't know.... That would be the worst crime of all.”
A very moving story about a boy who meets Hitler in person. And is influenced by Hitler's thoughts and actions. Incredibly well told!
A short novel but intriguing and disturbing in equal measures.Forget the links to Boy in the Striped Pyjamas as this is quite a different book all together , while it is set in WW2 and has the Fuhrer , the main character is very different and the book has a bit more meat to it than the simpler fable of The Boy in the striped Pyjamas. This is definitely a good thing. The predecessor is a brilliant book but trying to replicate it wouldn't have worked nearly as well.The main character here is Pierr...
Chilling. I’ve yet to read a John Boyne novel and be disappointed.
Cognitive dissonance, my old friend.I really hated this book but at the same time I literally could not put it down. From the very beginning I had a gut feeling it was going to make me sad. But it also made me angry. Experiencing those conflicting emotions simultaneously made me uncomfortable and I think that is, simply put, what makes Boyne's writing so compelling.He writes about the human condition with such audacity and incisiveness, yet its also clever and engrossing. In this case we have Pi...
4.5/5 starsJohn Boyne is the author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a book that showed the horror of concentration camps through the eyes of a child. In this new novel, Boyne has written a story in a similar vein (this time with more grit/violence) that shows the innocence and naiveté of childhood and how easily it can be corrupted.This is a short novel (220-ish pages) but it's packed with a lot of food for thought as it tackles some serious issues. While this book is written for a youth audi...
I finally picked up my first book by John Boyne and now I understand what everyone's talking about.I was always interested in history and WWII fascinated me in a horrible kind of way because I could never understand how almost a whole country, my country, could follow and believe a maniac and psychopath. This is a story about WWII but more about the people and how they changed, what they did. And John Boyne has a extraordinary talent to capture people and their development in certain situations
I’d had my sights on this one for a while, as A History of Loneliness by John Boyne ranks high among my favorites. The Boy on the Mountain is a young adult book, and, though a bit simplistic, it paints an unsettling picture. The story centers on a young orphan who is sent to live with his aunt, a servant in Hitler’s household. Thus begins a subtle erosion of personal values as well as an ebbing of integrity wrought by the protagonist Perriot’s association with Hitler and his insane, distorted wo...
I really enjoyed John Boyne’s other novel ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ so I decided to pick this up to see if he could surprise me with another great WW2 story again.Set in Paris, year 1936, this story follows Pierrot, a 6 year old child of a French mother and a German father. After they both die, he is sent to live with his aunt in Germany, who is a housekeeper for Hitler at his mountain top ‘retreat’ home. The evolution of Pierrot throughout this novel is both scary and amusing to read abo...