Blurb: In July 1942, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank and her family, fleeing the occupation, went into hiding in an Amsterdam warehouse. Over the next two years Anne vividly describes in her diary the frustrations of living in such close quarters, and her thoughts, feelings and longings as she grows up.
Age: 11+
Price: £5.99
I am very sorry for the long wait for the review, but it is here now…
I asked for this book for Christmas as I was really interested to read the diary of a girl who lived through the Holocaust. In case you didn’t know, the Holocaust was something that happened during WWII, where the Nazis were trying to get rid of the Jewish race through genocide (trying to kill them). This meant that Anne’s family had to go into hiding and so this is the diary of a girl during this horrible period in history. You can probably guess that things didn’t work out as the Franks were betrayed towards the end of the war. We are privileged to have documentation of what happened in that time.
This book was really interesting at the beginning but gradually got less and less interesting, as she started to only talk about Peter and how much she hated Mrs Van Dan. She was in a horrible situation stuck with people she didn’t really get on with, and the only thing she could do was write her feelings in her diary. But to me this started to become a bit tedious. This was not written to be published, as it was a diary that was found after the war and published by Anne Frank’s father. Sadly, they cut quite a lot of bits out as she was being to rude towards the families and it “couldn’t be published”. I think that these should have been kept in as it would have made it more truthful and you knew how she was truly feeling. Of course, I knew that it wasn’t going to be the most exciting book I have ever read because she was isolated in a hideout and really had nothing to write about, because she had no access to the outside world. It was interesting to find out how different and similar her life is to mine, some of it was scarily relatable and some of it was awful and I am very lucky to have never been put in that situation. Overall, I found it interesting yet terribly sad and it would sometimes fail to hold my attention, but saying that, I am proud to say I have read such a classic. I give this book a 6 out of 10 stars and I hope that you enjoyed my very late review.