Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

Title: Diary of a Young Girl Author: Anne Frank Genre: biography, ww2 Rating: 8/10 # pages: 237 Date read: March, 2008

Summary: This vivid, insightful journal is a fitting memorial to the gifted Jewish teenager who died at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Born in 1929, Anne Frank received a blank diary on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Her marvelously detailed, engagingly personal entries chronicle 25 trying months of claustrophobic, quarrelsome intimacy with her parents, sister, a second family, and a middle-aged dentist who has little tolerance for Anne's vivacity. The diary's universal appeal stems from its riveting blend of the grubby particulars of life during wartime (scant, bad food; shabby, outgrown clothes that can't be replaced; constant fear of discovery) and candid discussion of emotions familiar to every adolescent (everyone criticizes me, no one sees my real nature, when will I be loved?). Yet Frank was no ordinary teen: the later entries reveal a sense of compassion and a spiritual depth remarkable in a girl barely 15. Her death epitomizes the madness of the Holocaust, but for the millions who meet Anne through her diary, it is also a very individual loss.

Review: Again an important book about World War 2. Very well written - I kept forgetting it was a real diary and not a fictionalized account of their lives. However, this time around I also found it a very depressing read, because from the very begining you know (well, I did anyway) that Anne doesn't survive the war. I would have been interested in hearing more about what happened after the end of the diary, but I guess there's not much documentation on that.

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