Sarah's Key - Tatiana de Rosnay

Date Started - 6/29/12
Date Finished -6/30/12

Not going to lie, I didn't think I would finish this one so quickly. I was kind of counting on it to hold me over until the sequel to A Discovery of Witches comes out. Oh well! This was a great quick read and one that I would definitely recommend.

The story is really two intertwined stories, one taking place in 1942 and the other in modern day.

In 1942, Sarah is a French child who is rounded up by the French police and then shipped off to a holding camp before going to a concentration camp. She leaves her brother locked in a cupboard, hiding from the police, and promises she will be back for him.

In modern times, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, stumbles across the story of the roundup and begins a quest to find out what happened to Sarah (the apartment her architect husband is currently renovating and planning for them to move into, was originally hers).

For the first three-quarters of the book, the chapters alternate between Sarah and Julia's stories. Ultimately we find out what happened after Sarah escaped from the holding camp, was rescued by an elderly couple who helps her return to Paris and to her apartment, from Julia's father-in-law, who was a young child the day Sarah came home. Sarah pried open the cupboard and found her decomposing four year old brother inside, and was never the same again. She spent the remainder of her childhood with the couple who rescued her, but then cut off all contact and moved to America and never spoke of her past again. Her son, who Julia seeks out, had no idea any of this had happened to his mother, and it is through a writing he provides that they determine that she ultimately killed herself in a car wreck (rather than it being the accident they thought).

Julia's story, meanwhile, includes her husbands adultery, an unplanned pregnancy that her husband doesn't want, and ultimately the decision to leave him and move to New York. She names her daughter Sarah, and the book closes with her revealing this to Sarah's son, who has also ended up divorced in New York. I think it was fairly clear that the two of them would ultimately end up together, or at least I hoped that was what we can assume.

It's not a really uplifting book but a good one. That said, I'm not sure that I'd want to see the movie!