As the back cover says, “you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno.” Bruno lives in Nazi Germany during the war. His family moves to a house in the country, due to his father’s job, next to an odd place with lots of people wearing striped pyjamas. Bruno is puzzled by the whole thing.

Thanks to his powerful father the family is sheltered from most of the troubles that come with the war, but even so Bruno is not a credible 9-year-old. A boy of that age could not possibly miss that there is a war going on around him, or not know who the Führer is, or not have heard of Jews. (Come on, the word Führer is a normal German word meaning leader – how could a German boy NOT understand the word?) He would have to be incredibly stupid, or to live with his eyes shut and his ears covered, singing “la la la I cannot hear you”. This makes it rather hard to get engaged in Bruno’s view of life.

There’s not much else in the book to be engaged in, either. Everything except Bruno’s thoughts are very sketchily described, including his relationship and conversations with the one friend he finds. Perhaps Boyne does this to keep the book simple enough for children, but the end result is patronising and superficial.

The book is marketed as a child’s view of the Holocaust, but I wouldn’t give it to a child to teach them about the Holocaust. Firstly the book is sufficiently coy and indirect about what is actually happening, that a child reading it wouldn’t learn much unless they already knew a lot – and if they knew it already, they wouldn’t get anything new from this one. And secondly Boyne takes great liberties with various facts in order to make his plot work, so the reader would get a seriously misleading and sentimentalised picture of what it was like.

Very disappointing.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.