The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was one book i picked up because i had seen the movie minus the end of the movie and i quiet liked the movie of whatever i had seen and wanted to know where it finally went.


The book ended up being a simple read. It's from Bruno's point of view, the child who is oblivious of holocaust and the fact that his father served the Fury (Hitler). He had his own point of view to everything happening around him. Not understanding the seriousness of what was going on around him, He was happy in his idea of the world being perfect. He had to move with his family to Poland due to an assignment his father was put onto and that's where he meets his new friend on the other side of the FENCE Shmuel. Bruno wants to become an explorer when he grows up and since in this new place he does not have much to explore within the house he ends up venturing outside and begins a journey with Shmuel. While Bruno is his age and is innocent and unaware of everything going around him, Shmuel is that much more grown up after having seen the various atrocities and life changing events as part of a Jewish Family. Ironically they both share the same date of birth but still aged so differently.


From then on the book is about their relationship, about things that Bruno discovers but never understands and somehow the way the book ended completely took me by surprise and since i had not seen the end of the movie i was no where near expecting it. it shocked me, made me sad and wished it would end some other way but in the end when i think about it I guess the story ended just perfectly right. Any more than this i would give away the story :)


The movie also ended up coming again on one of the English movie channels last week after i was done with the book and so it was perfect timing and i have managed to complete both the book and the movie perfectly in sync.

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The perfume called BOOK

The smell of a new book, in fact the smell of a book itself has always made me go mad since childhood, It does till date. Every time I walk into a bookstore i can't keep my nose off one and the result is that I always walk out buying at least one. even though Flipkart has become my new bookstore but it's never the same just the way I feel an e-book can never replace the joy of holding the actual book in your hand.

I remember as a child I used to wait for the beginning of each year where in we would go to school a few days prior to the beginning of that session and get our books from school. oh the joy of looking at those books, smelling them and wrapping them with brown paper was always more exciting that the exams I had to eventually give thanks to those same books. I would always pounce on the books in my English course for the year and would have polished it off in a day straight. I already knew all the stories even before the year had begun and eventually yes i did get bored of the fact that i had to keep going through it again and again through the year but every time a story would end in class to go onto the next one i would look forward to that change and re - visiting it. Though the textbooks of other subjects never garnered such response from me except for smelling them, I never even opened them until the night before my exams. But the feeling would always be the same of welcoming a new book no matter what subject it was.

The obsession continues even today and thankfully today I read books because I enjoy them and not because I am forced to read them. and the fact that I can choose my own book to read also makes it more exciting. That is why a bookstore to me would never go out of fashion as that is one place that gives me ample scope to go wild with this obsession of mine :)

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