Thank you to NetGalley, Ebury Press, & Independent Publishers Group for the opportunity to read and review this book before it's publication date! This in no way affected my review, opinions are my own.

I can definitely understand why this was so heavily lauded in the 1957 after it was originally published, but I think understanding that this autobiographical novel was more so a collection of short stories that was put in chronological order would have set my expectations in the right direction from the get-go. After I realized this, I went back through and re-read certain stories again, and viewing them as independent of one another (while still collectively making up the whole) worked much better for me.

These stories were written by the author in her early 20s while recounting the Holocaust that took place during her mid to late teens, and the heartbreaking simplicity of the individual stories was so well done. Put into a historical lens, there were some things that didn't make sense (i.e. a Jewish teenager takes a train from Amersfoort to Amsterdam [25mi/49km] without showing any papers or being questioned/hassled sometime in the 1940s), but I don't think it's meant to make sense to anyone but the author.

I would recommend this to anyone, even those that don't typically find themselves reading WWII fiction.