by John Boyne
I was in the library looking for a John Boyne title recommended by a friend (The Heart’s Invisible Furies), which wasn’t on the shelf. But I pulled off All the Broken Places and was immediately fascinated. I was really only familiar with John Boyne as the young adult author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, of which there were many battered copies on my middle school library shelves, in addition to dozens and dozens of copies in our 8th grade core literature collection. It’s the poignant tale of Bruno, the nine-year-old German son of the commandant of “Out-With,” who thinks that the skinny people all dressed in striped uniforms across the fence from his yard are workers on some kind of a farm. He befriends a boy in striped pajamas and finds a place to crawl under the fence to be with his friend. This book is such a great experience of being an “omniscient reader,” knowing much more than the young protagonists in the story, and as it develops the reader has an inescapable sense of impending doom.
All the Broken Places is an adult novel that is the surprising sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, telling the story of Bruno’s now 91-year-old sister Gretel, who survived the war, married and was widowed by a British academic, and is now desperate to hide the shameful story of her past while simultaneously trying to protect and defend a young neighbor boy who reminds her of her brother Bruno. Masterfully navigating between past and present, Boyne leads the reader through layers of nuance that keep at bay the urge to stereotype and judge. I highly recommend it, but you would do well to read the young adult prequel first if you haven’t already.