The Storyteller - Jodi Picoult

[goodreads]

Title: The Storyteller
Author: Jodi Picoult
Genre: Fiction, WW2
Rating: 4/5
# pages: Audiobook ~18hrs
Date read: February, 2014

Sage Singer befriends an old man who's particularly beloved in her community. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. They strike up a friendship at the bakery where Sage works. One day he asks Sage for a favor: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses…and then he confesses his darkest secret - he deserves to die, because he was a Nazi SS guard. Complicating the matter? Sage's grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.

What do you do when evil lives next door? Can someone who's committed a truly heinous act ever atone for it with subsequent good behavior? Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren't the party who was wronged? And most of all - if Sage even considers his request - is it murder, or justice?

Very different from Jodi Picoult's other books, but also, I think, better. It was less emotionally manipulative than her books tend to be, while still packing a punch. Besides, I've always been fascinated by WW2, so that in itself made me interested in reading this book.

I 'read' it as an audiobook, where different people narrated the different sections, which I thought worked nicely. It helped me to always remember who was the narrator at any given time.

The moral dilemma was interesting, and is what I've come to expect from any book written by Jodi Picoult. There's no easy answer usually, but I think she handled it very tastefully.

It did have a slightly more open ending regarding Sage's future than I had expected, but not so open that it bothered me. Definitely a book I'd recommend - especially if you're interested in WW2 as seen from both a Jew and a German's POV.