Summary Statement: I Always Wanted to Know About Anne Frank's Family But This is Too Much Information
I read The Diary of a Young Girl in middle school in the early 1980s for the first time. I felt it changed my life. I have always wondered who here family was and what her life was like before The Holocaust. This book answers that and I thought I would be interested to know it.
Authors Pressler and Elias combed through over 6000 pieces of paper that were discovered in an attic. I cannot imagine such an undertaking to read through them and assemble it all, and am overwhelmed just thinking about it. I feel guilty saying that I only feel the book is 3 stars = It's Okay because I am sure that hundreds if not thousands of hours went into this project that culminated in this book. However I need to be honest so...
The book has too much information, too many details which are uninteresting to just not revealing or just are clutter. The book needed more editing. At about 400 pages it is just too long.
The book is not engaging or rivoting. It sputters and spurts along. Boring, then okay, then good, it goes along like that. The most interesting part to me was the general information about life in those days and some Jewish history that I was unaware of. The inclusion of some of the information such as poems people wrote and drawings the kids made left me thinking "who cares" and "so what". I hated that I felt that way as I wanted to love the book.
Another thing that bothered me was the way that sections are written in the first person with imagined scenes that were made up by the author. Taking what life was like in the day, Pressler tells stories about what the person was thinking as they went through their daily life. That went too far from me, it was unnecessary and felt like historical fiction.
In order to thoroughly enjoy every page of this book I imagine the reader would have to be extremely interested in the Frank family or a scholar of The Holocaust or some other similar extreme interest.
The book would have been better if it was edited further to cut to the chase, if it were written as straight nonfiction and really cut to the heart of who the people were and what life was like for them before World War II and The Holocaust hit.
I am disappointed that I didn't love the book. I wanted to love it.