I have had quite a degree of difficulty trying to rate and review this book. I notice that many people are rating it five stars but I cannot do that because it would put it on the same standing as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and to me at least it is certainly not that good. Boyne writes a very complex character in Gretel. Like all humans, she has made huge mistakes, has many regrets. But she’s been kind, thoughtful, and good as well. She’s ashamed and has spent her whole life denying that she had any responsibility in her father’s life work, even when she knew it was wrong. Gretel Fernsby has led a turbulent life. She is ninety-one and was at the age of twelve raised in a place she does no mention. It was a place of death and destruction trying to eradicate a race by a so called master plan. She is the daughter of the head of this place and is exposed to its horrors, but chooses to turn a blind eye. She is only twelve and what can a twelve year old do? After the death of someone close to her and eventually she and mother's escape to Paris for a time, Gretel, assumes a number of identities, always secretive, never allowing anyone except eventually her husband to know the terrible secret she carries.

Gretel insists to Kurt that she doesn’t wish the Allies had lost the war, despite the personal advantages she would have gained. Kurt doesn’t believe her: “You’re lying. . . . You are. I can see it in your face. You need to tell yourself that you wouldn’t so you can feel a sense of moral superiority, but I don’t believe you for even a moment” (253). Do you believe Gretel? Later, when Alex Darcy-Witt suggests that Gretel wishes Germany had won the war, she responds, “No one wins a war” (355). Why do you think she answers differently this time? My curtains twitched whenever the estate agent pulled up outside, escorting a client in to inspect the flat, and I made notes about each potential neighbour. There was a very promising husband and wife in their early seventies, softly spoken, who held each other’s hands and asked whether pets were permitted in the building– I was listening on the stairwell– and seemed disappointed when told they were not. A homosexual couple in their thirties who, judging by the distressed condition of their clothing and their general unkempt air, must have been fabulously wealthy, but who declared that the ‘space’ was probably a little small for them and they couldn’t relate to its ‘narrative’. A young woman with plain features who gave no clue as to her intentions, other than to remark that someone named Steven would adore the high ceilings. Naturally, I hoped for the gays– they make good neighbours and there’s little chance of them procreating– but they proved to be the least interested. It’s very much a story about grief and guilt. About trauma, and attempting to escape the past. About running, but never being able to hide. But it's also a compassionate book, and Gretel is a deeply flawed but likeable character and we can see how she has been shaped by events. We first met Gretel when she was 12 years old in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, living "on the other side of the fence" at "Out-with" (Auschwitz). In All the Broken Places Boyne imagines the life she might have led after the war and how she would have dealt with her sense of guilt about what she witnessed of her beloved father’s role as the commandant of one of the Third Reich's most notorious death camps. More specifically, we learn about the contradictions in Gretel's mind about what she saw and what she did and didn't do. "I didn't know" . We follow her from girlhood to the age of 92, as she moves from Poland to post-war France, then 1950s Australia and finally Britain. I told myself that none of it had been my fault, that I had been just a child, but there was that small part of my brain that asked me, if I was entirely innocent, then why was I living under an assumed name?”

Following the kidnapping, Gretel relocates to London, where she finds work at Selfridges. She falls for a coworker, David, initially unaware he’s Jewish until his friend Edgar tells her so. Nevertheless, she begins a romantic relationship with him. However, after attending a showing of a film about the Holocaust and seeing footage of her family in the film, Gretel runs out of the theatre and jumps in front of a bus in an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. In the hospital, Edgar informs her about David’s past; how he was born in Prague and escaped with his grandparents after the occupation, and that parents and sister were delayed and disappeared, ultimately being murdered in Treblinka extermination camp. Gretel also learns in hospital that she is pregnant with David's child. After being discharged, she comes clean and tell David the story of her life. He is disgusted and abandons her despite that she is carrying his child. Eventually, Gretel marries Edgar and gives up her and David’s daughter (whom she names Heidi) for adoption. as a ‘story’ ….. contemplating the experience of overwhelming guilt, complicity, grief, moral responsibility….and a private atonement….which a child carries into adulthood… ‘being-at-cause’ for the evils done by others is a thought-provoking controversy. Like a lot of people, I read ‘The Boy in Stripped Pyjamas’, getting on for 20 yrs ago now, and was heartbroken at the time. However, having read more about the responses to it over the years, not least from The Holocaust Learning Centre, much of the criticism is deserved, in my opinion. This novel, this exceptional, layered and compelling story,is built on modernhistory and all of us people who live it. The protagonist, the elderly, forthright and mysteriousMrs. Fernsby,is more thanmemorable andevery one of Boyne’scharacters,andevery scene,darkor light,is limnedin truth and insight. Thisbookmoves likea freight train,with force and consequence for the reader.”

We don’t need anyone to teach us how to recognise the barefaced devil; the danger is the insidious and gradual creep of violence into the civilised and everyday. This is what the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s dictum – “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – warned of: art unable to recognise the break the Holocaust represented with the past, afraid to apprehend the failure of the civilising project. With this childish drivel in which the villains and victims come labelled and sorted, Boyne yet again seems immune to its lessons.My Mayfair residence is listed as a flat but that is a little like describing Windsor Castle as the Queen’s weekend bolthole.” Clear your calendar. Get All the Broken Places and just don’t make any plans, other than to read and read and read.” But memories start to stir within Gretel when a new family moves into the flat directly below her. The nine year old boy, Henry, reminds her of the loss of her brother when he was that very same age so long ago. And as the mind plays its game of dominoes, one memory parlays upon another and dead timber rises to the surface. During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details – such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel – as creative licence. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.” I have to admit I have some prejudice against sequels released years after a popular first installment. It seems to me that they are usually not needed and are just an author's way of capitalizing on the success of their most popular work, or else catering to demanding fans. They often read like fanfiction. I can't help wondering if their ideas have just run dry. The Testaments, Go Set a Watchman, even Doctor Sleep... I can do without them, to be honest.

Under an assumed name, Gretel tries to reinvent herself, but is haunted by her past wherever she goes. We witness her being violently humiliated in France and fatefully crossing paths with a childhood love interest – a Nazi soldier – in Australia, causing her to flee to London. Before she starts dating the man who becomes her husband, she dates his Jewish friend, who lost his family in Treblinka. When she confesses her identity, he tells her to burn in hell and takes off to America. Gretel has a breakdown when her son is nine, the age at which her brother died. She spends a year in a psychiatric ward without confessing the source of her trauma to a doctor. A powerful novel about secrets and atonement after Auschwitz… All the Broken Places is a defence of literature's need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature; and it does so with a novelist's skill, precision and power." - The Guardian (UK)All the Broken Places jumps between the past, in which Gretel and her mother escape from Nazi Germany and attempt to rebuild their lives in a world with very good reason to hate them, and the present, in which ninety-one-year-old Gretel finds herself once again a witness to the suffering of innocents. She can't change the past, of course, but can she make a difference now?

Devlin, Martina (2022-09-22). "All The Broken Places by John Boyne: A sister's lifetime in the shadow of the death camps". Irish Independent . Retrieved 2023-01-09. Boyne has defended The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by pointing to its subtitle, “A Fable”, and his efforts to educate children that the book is a novel. Fiction should not bear the burden of education, he argues. Nonetheless, a survey by the London Jewish Cultural Centre found that 75 per cent of respondents thought that it had been based on a true story. Gretel is faced with a chance to expiate her guilt, grief and remorse and act to save a young boy – for the second time in her life. But to do so, she will be forced to reveal her true identity to the world. Will she make a different choice this time, whatever the cost to herself?

READERS GUIDE

While over a third of English secondary schools use The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and its film adaptation in Holocaust lessons, Auschwitz Memorial replied that the book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the Holocaust”. The tweet linked to a 2019 essay in which Hannah May Randall, the head of learning at Holocaust Centre North, highlights the novel’s historical inaccuracies and faults it for perpetuating “dangerous myths”. For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him. Among my most popular books are The Heart’s Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky and My Brother’s Name is Jessica.