This is an odd book. The illustrations — digital collages by Isabelle Cardinal — are quirky, and while not necessarily the wrong choice for a book about Auschwitz, over power the story, which starts abruptly and rather cliched (waking up), and then finishes just as abruptly. This isn’t Holocaust 101 For Kids — we aren’t given a primer on Nazis or concentration camps or the Second World War. And that’s the saddest thing about this book — my daughter is privileged enough that she would need a Holocaust 101 before reading this book to understand it. Imagine if you don’t have to do that, to introduce that narrative to a child because the existence of it (or similar events like what happened in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, etc.) is omnipresent in her and her family’s history. That makes me so sad, even if I found the book so uneven.
The Promise by Pnina Bat Zvi and Margie Wolfe went on sale April 18, 2018.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.