#february read

The Choice by Edith Eger

Genre: Autobiography

It’s 1944 and sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger is sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive.

The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story. It shows that hope can flower in the most unlikely places.

Review

I genuinely don’t know how to start this review, and it’s difficult to describe this book without feeling like I’m not doing its author justice. Dr Eger shares her life in The Choice, granting the reader insight into her deepest feelings, into the most horrible and vulnerable moments of her life. She takes us back to her childhood, showing how her family’s religious background started to slowly influence her life as anti-semitism gained traction in Europe, and also what kind of family hers was. The first half of the book is about the year she spent in the hands of the Nazis, being deported to Auschwitz, and how her sister and she are sent on endless marches meant to kill them.

Many books about the Holocaust that I’ve read so far end with the liberation from the concentration camp, but for The Choice, it’s only a turning point. Dr Eger shows us how her life after the war looked like, how she tried to run away from what had happened to her, from the loss of her parents. Her trauma still influences her decades later, and she takes us on the journey of her personal healing that lasted just as long.

Whistle In The Dark by Emma Healey

Genre: Mystery

Jen and Hugh Maddox have just survived every parent’s worst nightmare.

Relieved, but still terrified, they sit by the hospital bedside of their fifteen-year-old daughter, Lana, who was found bloodied, bruised, and disoriented after going missing for four days during a mother-daughter vacation in the country. As Lana lies mute in the bed, unwilling or unable to articulate what happened to her during that period, the national media speculates wildly and Jen and Hugh try to answer many questions.

Where was Lana? How did she get hurt? Was the teenage boy who befriended her involved? How did she survive outside for all those days? Even when she returns to the family home and her school routine, Lana only provides the same frustrating answer over and over: “I can’t remember.”

Review

I admit that I was mostly tempted to buy this book because of the absolutely beautiful cover - the story sounded just interesting enough, lol.

I should really get that cover-affinity treated, because it led me to a book that I wish I hadn't bought. Or that I could have lived without, whichever way you want to formulate it.

If I had to describe this book in one word, I would probably chose this: Weird.

The books seems to want to display Lana's behaviour after reappearing and returning home as odd and suspicious, but after finishing the book, it is definitely her mother, Jen, who's the one with the weird behaviour. She seems to have quite big issues herself - while trying to find out what happened to Lana (with an understandable amount of anxiety inside her), she grows more and more paranoid. She suspects supernatural stuff, or even a conspiracy, thinks she hears voices... I found it all a little tiring after some time, because Jen's behaviour often doesn't help Lana at all. Lana isn't very cooperative either, of course, but I'm pretty sure that Jen's behaviour would be on the list of "How not to treat your depressed, suicidal daughter after she's just been missing for four days and seems traumatised from it". The middle part ended up quite... well, boring to me because it was filled with Jen's conspiracies and her disrespecting her daughter's privacy. I firmly believe that Lana maybe would have opened up eventually about what happened if she'd been given the space to work through it, especially in therapy, without her parents there.

Only the end really interested me and everything Lana did made sense afterwards, but making my way through, let's say, 150 pages of very slow progression filled with mostly information about Jen didn't seem worth it.

I would have liked to hear more about where Lana's depression came from, why it got that bad, but instead there's, as I said, a lot of input about Jen.

February’s Read