** spoiler alert ** Honestly? I hated this book. Good story, horrible book. If your thing is that you're going to be gross about sex because it's relevant to the time period, or characters, or story, then fine, go ahead and do it. But to be gross and include sexually explicit content just because you can, that's just stupid. If this book had been just about Sophie, and even included some of her sex experiences, that would have been fine. But the book should have really been called: I'm a perv, and here's some stuff about a girl in WWII. The author wasn't gross about sex because that's how it was in the concentration camps, he was just gross about sex for the hell of it. I don't need to know about the narrator's sex life and/or every impure thought, most of which are not relevant to the story. Oh, and almost most of the Nazi's sexual histories/fantasies. Because who they want to sleep with is relevant to why they're being assholes I guess (not). Why in the world do you have something about peeing in someone's mouth?? It's absolutely disgusting and absolutely irrelevant! And another thing: How weak do you think women really are? Sophie was supposedly raped or almost raped, what, 3 or 4 times? One by a finger in a subway? You think we just stand there with our legs open? Another by a maid, who supposedly eats out Sophie in a hall closet. You don't think she could have done one thing to prevent that from happening? Like, I don't know, keep your legs closed and push her away??? All that, and she still just sleeps with the narrator, despite how in love she is with her psycho boyfriend. Oh my God, this book was just so inappropriate. And it's a pretty convenient trick to create a character that just lies all the time. You can change your entire history of events by just saying "Oh, I lied about that." You can change just about anything halfway through the book, for that matter. "Oh, I forgot to tell you..."

I'm not sure if I've ever said this, but the movie was way better, and much MUCH more tastefully done. I watched it when I was halfway through the book because I wanted to see what happened to Sophie, but really didn't feel like reading the rest of it. I will never recommend this book to anyone. He tries to use a lot of pretty, big words, but you can't use them to disguise horrible writing.