I promised not to blog about this book again, though technically this post is about the movie and not the book and I am predisposed not to see the movie, I will abide by the essense of the promise and link to Elizabeth Bird's Horn Book review, From Page to Screen, Mark Herman's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Here's an excerpt from her review:
"While many children's books have sought to teach young readers about Hitler's greatest atrocity, few have been quite as divisive as John Boyne's 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This novel has caused some readers to sing its praises to the heavens while others desire nothing more than to rake out their own eyeballs after a chapter or two. The tale involves a preternaturally naive child who inadvertently discovers a concentration camp in his backyard and a new friend on the other side of the fence. Some find the book to be a heartwarming tale of innocence in the midst of horror, while others, like myself, have found it to be disingenuous, oppressively repetitive, infuriating, and unbelievable. Mark Herman serves as both director and screenwriter to this Miramax film and in doing so attempts to replace the novel’s more naively tweek elements with an honest-to-goodness story arc. That it isn’t effective is due less to Herman's clear labor of love than to the material he has to work with." - Elizabeth Bird, The Horn Book.
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