Book review Andrés Savchynets

• Tittle: The boy of the striped pyjama
  
• Author: John Boyne
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Random House
• Pages: 224

Irish writer John Boyne's fourth novel is the first he has written for children. It's a hard story of an odd friendship between two boys in terrible circunstances during the jewish holocaust.

Bruno is a nine-year-old boy growing up in Berlin during World War II. He lives in a five-storey house with servants, his mother and father and 12-year-old sister, Gretel. They have just been visited by a very important personage called the Fury. As a consequence of this visit, Bruno's father gets a new uniform, his title changes to Commandment and, they find themselves moving to a new home at a place called Out-With.

When Bruno gets there he is immediately homesick. He has left his school, his three best friends, his house, his grandparents... His new home is smaller, full of soldiers and there is no one to play with. From his bedroom window, however, he notices a group of people dressed in striped pyjamas separated from him by a wire fence. When he asks his father who those people are, he responds that they aren't really people.

Bruno is forbidden to explore. But one day, he follows the wire fence cordoning off the area where these people live from his house. He spots a dot in the distance on the other side of the fence and as he gets closer, he sees it's a boy. Excited by the prospect of a friend, Bruno introduces himself. The Jewish boy's name is Samuel. Almost every day, they meet at the same spot and talk. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, Bruno decides to climb under the fence and explore Shmuel's world.

The story puts you directly into Bruno´s worlwiew. The book is really hard, i also have seen the film and it is also nice. But i prefer th book i recomend it to people from 14 years i think it is interesting as a compulsory reading at school.