For over a year, folks have been coming into the store and telling me about Sarah’s Key, a novel set during the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1942. Book clubs around the country have made the novel a surprise bestseller and I decided it was time for the Queen Anne Books monthly book discussion group to jump on the band wagon.

The novel is divided into two storylines — one historical and one contemporary. The more compelling story is Sarah’s who is just 10-years old when she, her mother and father are taken with 13,000 other Jews to the Velodrome d’Hiver, held in inhuman conditions for six days, and from there sent to Auschwitz. Sarah, believing they will only be gone a few hours, locks her four-year-old brother Michael in a secret cabinet in their apartment and when the opportunity arises, she manages a daring escape hoping to get back to Paris and save her brother.

Alternating chapters are told from the perspective of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris in 2002. She has been asked to write a story commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup and while researching her story (which also helps the reader understand the history behind Sarah’s story), she learns there is a link between her own life and Sarah’s.

The novel moves back and forth between Sarah’s story and Julia’s and while Sarah’s was the more gripping, Julia’s chapters provided a welcome relief from the horror of Paris in 1942.

Though not a perfect book, de Rosnay is a terrific storyteller and the novel generated a great discussion at our May meetings. ~Patti