Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you didn't already know how Jews were treated in WWII this book gives some important fact about the horror. However, I've read a lot of books about this era in the past 45 years and Sarah's Key ranks at the very bottom of my reading list. It's good for showing how NOT to write. The author has focused on an important historical event, and apparently she's satisfied a lot of readers. But I found the book itself dreadful for many of the same reasons given by other readers above: It's wordy, wordy, wordy, and filled with choppy, redundant sentences, poor character development, weak plotting, and heavy sentimentality. De Rosnay has little ability to use language in a way that conveys the sense of a place, a situation, an era, or the truths of a human heart. Instead she pounds the reader over the head again and again with the same few points about the Vel' d'Hiv'. and wastes the rest of the book letting her narrator stew. In short sentences. To no good end.