Product Description

Sage Singer has a past that makes her want to hide from the world. Sleeping by day and working in a bakery by night, she kneads her emotion into the beautiful bread she bakes.

But when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Josef Weber, a quiet man old enough to be her grandfather, and respected pillar of the community, she feels that finally, she may have found someone she can open up to.

Until Josef tells her the evil secret he's kept for sixty years.

Caught between Josef's search for redemption and her shattered illusions, Sage turns to her family history and her own life for answers. As she uncovers the truth from the darkest horrors of war, she must follow a twisting trail between betrayal and forgiveness, love and revenge. And ask herself the most difficult question she has ever faced - can murder ever be justice? Or mercy?

Taking this book along to the Loughborough Bookcrossing Unconvention this weekend, 22-24th September and adding to the book buffet. :)

Picked it up from the book buffet.

I've read a lot of books about the Holocaust, but it never gets any easier to read about the evil that people can do to each other.

Picoult does a decent job here. The coincidental nature of the way the modern-day characters were brought together wasn't really to my liking. But the rest of the story is well drawn and seems to be well researched. But, if you're going to use German phrases, get someone to proofread them - there were typos, which defeats the point. I also didn't care much for Leo's Europe-bashing, implying that Europe didn't do much to bring Nazi war criminals to justice and that the US was having to step in and act as the world's conscience. But then that might just be modern-day politics speaking.

The main drawback, as always with Picoult, was the ending. I know she wants to provoke debate, but I felt the rest of the book was a good enough basis for that. Careful reading revealed the final twist way before it happened. And yet there would have been a much more subtle way to reveal it, through one of Jozef's comments.

But all in all it was a good read.

Taking it to the Ipswich Unconvention.