A Family Secret by Eric Heuvel.
So I was initially drawn to this graphic novel because of the cover. The first thing that stuck out to me was the Jewish star from the Holocust. Then I looked more and recognized lots of other WWII artifacts. I saw that this book had something to do with the Holocust. So I strated to read it. The book is about a boy who searches through his grandmother's attic to find things to sell at a yard sale on Dutch Queen's day. He find his grandmothers scrapbook where he discovers some secrets about his grandmothers losing her best friend. The reason this worked as a graphic novel is because the pictures take you back to the time of WWII so it is like you can see what is going on. I know that you mentioned in class how you don't like when the story is about someone losing a Jewish friend during the war and I am with you, especially having 2 grandparents that survived the Holocust in Poland. So that part was hard for me to get around. HOWEVER, the difference in this story unlike most is that because it is a graphic novel, you might be hearing it from another point of view but you SEE it like you were there. It is almost like a sneaky little way of getting around the usual way of telling a Holocust story. I give the author props for that. On that note, I think this story put a unique twist on how to go about learning history through pictures. But maybe it is just me because I am not a fan of graphic novels, but I couldn't get past that. I just didnt know how to read it. If I looked at the pictures and the words I was thinking about both and you can't read one without the other. It is like you have to re-learn to read with these books. I got confused while reading it personally. I just don't know where to look or when to look. Sometimes I look at the pictures first but then I don't want to go and read the lines and I would get lost.
I do want to point out that this book didn't exactly sugar coat what happened in WWII either. There are some pretty detailed images like page 50 where Esther is walking through town and sees a girl with her head shaved being tourtered in the town square and a swastika painted on her head. That caught my eye.
Overall I am still not sure how I feel about this book. Like I said I think it is a cool way to put a new spin on reading about history and how we read about the horrors of WWII, but I am just not the type of person who enjoys graphic novels so it was hard for me to force myself to read it. I thought this would end up being a book that I could write about for a long time on thsi blog but it didn't turn out to be that way. I know that my personal opinion of how books written about the Holocust are biased since I do have surviving family so I also wanted to note that since that definatly plays a big role as to HOW I read books about this particular issue.
So I was initially drawn to this graphic novel because of the cover. The first thing that stuck out to me was the Jewish star from the Holocust. Then I looked more and recognized lots of other WWII artifacts. I saw that this book had something to do with the Holocust. So I strated to read it. The book is about a boy who searches through his grandmother's attic to find things to sell at a yard sale on Dutch Queen's day. He find his grandmothers scrapbook where he discovers some secrets about his grandmothers losing her best friend. The reason this worked as a graphic novel is because the pictures take you back to the time of WWII so it is like you can see what is going on. I know that you mentioned in class how you don't like when the story is about someone losing a Jewish friend during the war and I am with you, especially having 2 grandparents that survived the Holocust in Poland. So that part was hard for me to get around. HOWEVER, the difference in this story unlike most is that because it is a graphic novel, you might be hearing it from another point of view but you SEE it like you were there. It is almost like a sneaky little way of getting around the usual way of telling a Holocust story. I give the author props for that. On that note, I think this story put a unique twist on how to go about learning history through pictures. But maybe it is just me because I am not a fan of graphic novels, but I couldn't get past that. I just didnt know how to read it. If I looked at the pictures and the words I was thinking about both and you can't read one without the other. It is like you have to re-learn to read with these books. I got confused while reading it personally. I just don't know where to look or when to look. Sometimes I look at the pictures first but then I don't want to go and read the lines and I would get lost.
I do want to point out that this book didn't exactly sugar coat what happened in WWII either. There are some pretty detailed images like page 50 where Esther is walking through town and sees a girl with her head shaved being tourtered in the town square and a swastika painted on her head. That caught my eye.
Overall I am still not sure how I feel about this book. Like I said I think it is a cool way to put a new spin on reading about history and how we read about the horrors of WWII, but I am just not the type of person who enjoys graphic novels so it was hard for me to force myself to read it. I thought this would end up being a book that I could write about for a long time on thsi blog but it didn't turn out to be that way. I know that my personal opinion of how books written about the Holocust are biased since I do have surviving family so I also wanted to note that since that definatly plays a big role as to HOW I read books about this particular issue.
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