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Boy In the Striped Pajamas (Movie Tie-in Edition) | 
| Author: John Boyne
Publisher: David Fickling Books
List Price: $8.99
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Rating:  114 reviews
Sales Rank: 1376
Media: Paperback
Edition: Mti
Reading Level: Young Adult
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.4
ISBN: 0385751893
EAN: 9780385751896
ASIN: 0385751893
Publication Date: October 28, 2008
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Amazon.com Review
Book Description This work was set in Berlin, 1942. When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. But, Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than what meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is now a major motion picture (releasing in November 2008). Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see a larger image in a new browser window.
Product Description
Berlin 1942
When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance.
But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 109 more reviews...
 This one stands apart, for many reasons, should be on anyone's "must read" list February 11, 2008
K. Corn (Indianapolis,, IN United States)
46 out of 52 found this review helpful
I've read many books that fall into the "Holocaust literature" category. This one may actually be a book that is written in a style that COULD be read by a child but should be read by adults. Whether it is suitable for children depends on how sensitive your child is- and how well you think he or she could handle some very graphic details. They aren't "graphic" in the sense of being spelled out in detail but the reader's imagination can fill in the blanks. At age 9, this book would have been far too intense for me - and the main character in this one, Bruno, is age 9.
The author used a technique which was brilliant, taking readers into the mind and thoughts of a child whose father work for the "Fury" (the Fuhrer) and who is sent to live in Out-With (Auschwitz), on the safe side of the fence, in an actual home.
The novel is labeled "a fable" and I think this was a wise choice by both author and publisher. After all, no one knows exactly how a 9 year old son of a German officer would think and young Bruno seems remarkably naive sometimes. But just as light sets off shadows more vividly, I think his exaggerated innocence allows readers to experience the horrors of Auschwitz that much more. For that reason, I don't think the accuracy of Bruno's character is all that important. The effect on the reader (THIS reader, anyway) is profound and deep.
After moving to Out-With (Auschitz) Bruno meets a boy "on the other side of the fence", one who is the same age, a lad named Schmuel. At first Bruno is envious of the boy who gets to wear striped pajamas all day and who seems to have lots of companions.
On Bruno's side there are few playmates and he doesn't realize that he has so much compared to Schmuel. There is a sudden twist in this tale and I can't write about that. I will say it is the one reason adults should read this book before sharing it with children.
The book isn't quite like any other of this type I've read, not even The Diary of Anne Frank. Each chapter has a simple headline (Bruno Makes a Discovery, Bruno Tells a Perfectly Reasonable Lie) that reads like something a child could write. So do the words of each chapter and I think the child's voice should speak to both the child and adult residing in readers. It certainly did for me!
You'll be haunted by this one. If you get the edition with a Reading Guide included, you will find all sorts of extra features, includng an interview with the author, John Boyne.
 A Fable for Whom? August 25, 2006
A. Ross (Washington, DC)
45 out of 58 found this review helpful
This YA ("young adult") book is packaged with an air of mystery -- its cover art is almost completely neutral and there's no story synopsis anywhere on it. The author (and/or publisher) clearly believes that the reader will be best served not knowing much beyond the fact that the protagonist is a 9-year-old boy named Bruno. However (semi-spoiler alert), most adult readers will very quickly realize that Bruno is the son of a high-ranking Nazi official in wartime Berlin, and that the setting will doubtless be shifting to a concentration camp (both the title and subtle cover art strongly hint at this). And so here is another book to add to the every-expanding Holocaust reading list.
The important thing to know is that this very clearly labeled "A Fable". Some readers may be distracted or put off by some of the story's technical impossibilities (one of which is utterly crucial to the plot) and psychological improbabilities. However, to do so, is to ultimately miss the point. Yes, it is wholly unlikely that the son of a high-ranking Nazi would be oblivious to or unconcerned about the war, or wholly unaffected by the state's propaganda machine. But to mimic reality would also be to rob the narrative of the sense of discovery that makes it rather more compelling than the average Holocaust book. Even knowing everything that's to come, there's a certain grim fascination to be had watching the naive Bruno. Yes he's clueless and selfish and self-absorbed, but he's a 9-year-old boy -- that's to be expected.
As the sparse story unfolds, Bruno makes friends with a Jewish boy from Krakow who lives on the other side of a concentration camp fence. This has tragic consequences that are telegraphed very early on and consequently a shock only to those who haven't been paying attention. Its certainly true that plenty of logistical and technical truths have been distorted in the service of the story (most notably the existence of Bruno's Jewish friend, who, due to his age, would have been immediately murdered upon arrival in Auschwitz), but quibbling over the real location of buildings and security arrangements along the fence line doesn't really help anyone trying to grapple with the Holocaust. It is a work of fiction, clearly labeled as such, and so one must allow for such dramatic license.
What is somewhat confusing and interesting to contemplate is who exactly this book is intended for. Young readers who aren't familiar with the Holocaust may well enjoy the book as a kind of strange Poe-like horror tale, but aren't going to grasp the larger significance. Nor are they likely to understand how the book works on an allegorical level, where Bruno represents both the average German citizen who was ignorant and then "looked the other way" when it suited them, as well as the"lost generation" whose youth was consumed by the war. Similarly Bruno's father represents the true believer who realizes all too late the true cost of his actions. However, I suspect that ending will resonate deeply with younger readers and greatly divide adult readers. It's such a calculated affair that it's either likely to push your buttons perfectly and leave you in tears, or strike you as a mawkish misfire along the lines of drivel such as the film "Life in Beautiful." My own take is that while the simple prose and novel narrator make the story compellingly readable, too much of the story is predictable, and ultimately it's probably best left for classroom use.
Sadly the central figure is too implausible May 11, 2007
Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom)
42 out of 50 found this review helpful
The subtitle of this book is `A Fable', and so I suppose we are not meant to look for too much realism in this Holocaust story. Possibly (so one review suggests) written for children, its subject matter is grim enough; but its tone, especially at the beginning, put me off: it is faux-naive and painfully arch; and there are too many unbelievable aspects of it. The central character is nine-year old Bruno. The first false note is struck when Bruno learns that `the Fury' has big things in mind for his father, who is a high-ranking member of the SS and is in fact being posted, with his family, from Berlin to become the Commandant at Auschwitz. Of course it is ludicrous that a nine-year old in Nazi Germany would have misheard - not just once but persistently - `the Fury' for the Fuehrer or `Out-With' for Auschwitz (the puns don't work in German anyway). In 1943 a little German boy, especially one whose father was in the SS, would have been in the Pimpfen, the section of the Hitler Youth for six to ten year olds, where he would already have learnt to worship the Fuehrer; he would have learnt the notion of the Fatherland, which in this novel seems to puzzle him; he would most likely have followed the campaigns of the German army on maps and would have known (as he doesn't) where Poland was; and he would already have become familiar, at least in the abstract, with the concept of Untermenschen - instead of which he doesn't even know what a Jew is, and, when his sister mentions the word, he asks her whether he and she were Jews! He had lived in the Commandant's house at Auschwitz for a whole year - and we are to believe that he had never heard the word!
Some parts of the book are a little more credible. A child would probably not have known what it was dangerous to say (though I have to say that, as a nine-year old myself in Nazi Germany, I did have a pretty good sense of that.) Many Germans, and especially children, would not have known of the horrors of the concentration camps and would have been as uncomprehending as Bruno was of what they saw: the ghost-like creatures on the other side of the barbed wire fence which separated the camp from the neat garden of the Commandant's house.
Bruno hates his new home. For one thing, there are no other children for him to play with. And then one day Bruno disobeys orders and goes `exploring' along the fence and at the far end and on the other side of it he meets Shmuel - the boy (of exactly the same age as Bruno) in the striped pyjamas - who is sitting there all on his own, and they meet in that spot and talk regularly thereafter for a year. Shmuel understands the difference between their situations well enough, but Bruno is impossibly naive and obtuse in picking up the meaning of what his new friend is telling him, though something tells him that he should not tell his family of these meetings. He remains innocent until the end.
Of course the heart of the author is in the right place; and he does convey the horror of the camps; but I could not suspend my disbelief in Bruno - and without that ability, the book did not work for me either as a fable or as a credible story, and so I have some reservation about this flawed way of dealing with the Holocaust.
 A Problematic Holocaust Text July 23, 2008
Danny Maurice (Chicago, IL United States)
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
In 2009, I intend to teach John Boyne's "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" as part of an undergraduate Holocaust education class. However, I will be including the novel in the syllabus because it is an excellent example of a highly flawed Holocaust text, of which educators need to be wary. A text, by the way, that has been very well received by critics and the general reading public.
Boyne's "fable" is certainly well written, it is accessible (to both teenagers and adults), it is memorable, and it is even profound. But these attributes are overshadowed by Boyne's carelessness; the plot has problematic historical inaccuracies that are incredibly misleading and - I believe - damaging to the goals of Holocaust education.
(1) We discover that Shmuel, the title character and a prisoner at Auschwitz, is nine years old. However, it is extremely well documented that, upon arrival at Auschwitz (and other Nazi death camps), almost all children under 15 years old were sent immediately to be gassed, as the Nazis could not (or would not) use them as slave labor. The few exceptions to this rule were children who were either slightly younger than 15 and survived by lying about their age or children (of all ages) who were used in forced pseudo-medical experiments, confined to the camp laboratories, and rarely survived. Nine year olds did not wander around Auschwitz. And they certainly could not wander, "for several weeks... almost every afternoon" (p. 150), to the same place by the camp fence, to meet their new friend, who just happened to be the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer.
(2) Which brings us to Bruno, the protagonist, the son of the Kommandant of Auschwitz. Bruno is also nine years old (he and Shmuel, they discover quickly, were born on exactly the same day). Bruno's age is also highly problematic. We realize quickly that Bruno is naive to what his father does for a living and where he and his sister have been brought to live. Bruno is also ignorant to the existence of the Jews - until he meets his new friend, Shmuel. Again, history - and common sense - would reveal this to be practically impossible. All German children were educated, from an early age, about the Jews. Children were taught - through carefully designed books and school lessons - that the Jews were the "parasites" of society; sub-humans to be loathed, oppressed, and discarded. Children joined youth groups and attended rallies that made the Nazis' perceptions of the Jews very clear. It is practically impossible for a nine year old German boy in 1940s Nazi Europe - the son of the Kommandant of Auschwitz, no less! - to have entirely missed what was considered a vital piece of German education.
Now, you might ask: If the story is so compelling, accessible, and thought-provoking, then does it really matter that there are these inaccuracies? Yes. It does. It matters a great deal. If a goal of Holocaust education is to try to understand how and why the Holocaust occurred, so as to help us prevent current and future genocides, then we must try our best to understand how and why the Nazis did what they did to distinct groups of people that they considered "unworthy of life." To truly understand the Nazis' intentions and methods, it is imperative that we include in our considerations their policies of (a) gassing all Jewish children under 15 years old and (b) teaching all German children to hate Jews. If these two policies become distorted - or even ignored - when teaching about the Holocaust, then we might never learn the core lessons of these world-changing events.
It is important to point out that my problem is not necessarily with historical inaccuracies alone (Jane Yolen's time-travel fantasy "The Devil's Arithmetic" comes to mind as another impossible tale); my problem lies in an author's intentions and misadventures. Yolen uses time-travel as a tool to engage her young readers in Holocaust content, while keeping historical accuracy intact. But Yolen knows, just as well as her readers, that time-travel is entirely and so obviously unfeasible. Unfortunately, by the end of his fable, Boyne comes across just as unaware about the problems in his own writing as the naive enthusiasts who claim that "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is an important Holocaust text. I still encourage adults (and only adults) to read this book, but to read it only because it reminds us to be wary of badly researched historical fictions that, in the end, teach us little about the true lessons of history.
 This book could have offered so much more October 15, 2006
radar28
16 out of 22 found this review helpful
After reading a brief synopsis of the book, I was interested enough to purchase it. The Holocaust from the point of a child would have been a truly good story, but the character of this book is made into a downright idiot. His father was a Commandant, he was taught to salute Hitler, but somehow his parents never got around to telling him about Hitler, the Jews, the "master" race??? I asked the six year old across the street and he knew more about the Holocaust than the main character did. The author is a wonderful storyteller, and that kept me reading to the end. The ending, however, felt far too contrived. It's as if by making the story end this way, the author somehow equalizes things out. I was disappointed that what could have been a truly excellent book was trivialized by the ending. I have mixed feelings about recommending this book. Yes, it is a good plot, but executed in such a way that I feel the author almost played it too safe for fear of upsetting anyone, and in the process, educating no one. For children today so removed from this part of history, the author could have done so much more to make them understand. If you are looking for a book for you or your child, this makes for a quick read, but not a thought-provoking one.
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