The Storyteller in Retro Chapter Chicks

Nov 27, 2018 Brina rated it really liked it

Shelves: family-saga, fairy-tale, fiction, holocaust

Over the past year I have made it a point to focus on trimming the books on my to read list, giving me little wiggle room for much else. When a friend on the moderating team of retro chapter chicks here on goodreads mentioned wanted to read The Storyteller to finally get it off of her to read list, I said that I would join her. With family joining me over a holiday weekend, The Storyteller would be a perfect book, one that does not require much attention on my part and would still be enjoyable. Over the past year I have made it a point to focus on trimming the books on my to read list, giving me little wiggle room for much else. When a friend on the moderating team of retro chapter chicks here on goodreads mentioned wanted to read The Storyteller to finally get it off of her to read list, I said that I would join her. With family joining me over a holiday weekend, The Storyteller would be a perfect book, one that does not require much attention on my part and would still be enjoyable. What I did not know was that The Storyteller may be chick lit on the surface but multilayered and a book that reads in more than black and white.

Sage Singer is twenty five years old, is in the throes of an affair with a married man, is a master baker, and bares the reminder of her mother's death three years earlier from a scar running up and down her face. Sage thinks she is an ugly duckling, she is an atheist, her sisters Pepper and Saffron blame her for her mother's death, and she took the baking job so that she would be hidden from the small town community in which she lives. Besides the comfort that baking gives her, Sage's only console is in the form of a grief support group that she attends each week. It is there that she meets nonagenarian Josef Weber, who plays the role of her town's favorite grandfather.

In their grieving, Sage and Josef become the least likely of friends. They play chess together on Josef's handcrafted set; Josef falls for Sage's baking and Sage falls for Josef's dog. The two become comfortable enough that Josef entrusts Sage with a secret-- that he is a former SS member of the Nazi party and has been living in hiding for the last seventy years. Because she is a Jew, Josef wants Sage to assist him in dying. To Sage, this is complicated, not just because to her murder means crime and prison time but because her beloved grandmother Minka Lewin is a holocaust survivor. To side with Josef would mean to betray Minka yet to kill a Nazi would mean to obliterate another 'bad guy' from the face of this earth.

True to Picoult's style, she introduces Department of Justice employee Leo Stein, who is Jewish, a Nazi hunter, and also falls in love with Sage baggage in all. Together Sage and Leo get Minka to tell her story, to see if Josef really is who he says he is. Being that Leo hunts Nazis for a living, he brings another perspective that was already beginning to be read in gray rather than black and white. Together with Sage, Leo coaxes Minka to tell her tale in the hopes of bringing one more Nazi to justice. Readers find out that Minka Lewin was a typical teenaged Jewish girl living in Poland. She loved writing and together with her best friend Dariya dreamed of living in London and writing for a magazine. Minka worked after school where she happened to excel at German at her father's bakery where he would bake a special roll just for her that had cinnamon and chocolate inside. Minka uses her father's profession as background to construct a novel about an upior, a Polish mythical creature, that she has yet to complete when the Nazis come to power.

Minka finds herself in Auschwitz. Her knowledge of German land her in choice jobs including as secretary for the treasurer of the camp. We find out that he is actually a good person and had no choice but to serve his country or he would have disappeared. It is Minka's tale that saves her life as this SS officer wills her to write ten more pages a night, as he is captivated by this story. Because of his own love for literature, Minka's life is spared. Yet her story of the baker's daughter, the upior, and people having the potential to love and hate does not have an ending; as a story within a story, the upior's story is not written in black and white and it is up to the reader to create their own ending.

The Storyteller is the second of Jodi Picoult's books that I have read. While not the best of literature, her novels feature multifaceted current events issues that are sure to generate much discussion. In complex characters Sage, Josef, Minka, and to a certain extent, Leo, readers are treated to a complex web of humans and the potential for each person to love and to hate. How they choose to act on these emotions and impulses is up to each person to decide. As with Small Great Things, the other of Picoult's novels that I have read, The Story Teller had not been on my radar prior to reading it, yet I was treated to the type of multilayered novel taking place across two distinct eras that I am apt to enjoy. Perhaps this is a sign that I should not wait for a friend to be reading a Jodi Picoult novel to be moved to read one myself. The Storyteller ended up being a compelling read, and one that I am glad to have joined in on.

4 stars

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Dec 02, 2018 Tasha rated it liked it

3.5

An interesting story of one we are familiar with but each new story from this time in history continues to have an emotional impact. I'm rating this a little lower only because I'm not a fan of the more present day story, a bit of romance tucked in, and the ending didn't really work for me. This is just my second book by Picoult and I felt she handled the issues with respect and created an interesting story overall. ...more

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Apr 14, 2013 Lory Sakay rated it really liked it

Thought the way Sage's character was developed was weak. She was painted as an insecure loner yet went on to make some very brash moves, very out of character. I did like the reference to the baking and how that was tied into the novel. I also really enjoyed grandma's story and how it aligned with Josef; I'm not so sold on the whole hunt for Nazi's in America -how that moved this all along. I also thought it was strange to have such a large portion of the novel in Leo's voice. I would've much pr ...more

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Jul 12, 2014 Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ Jenn Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ Schu rated it liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, retro-chicks-f2f, tbrhchallenge

An interesting story. My favorite part of the story was the storytelling and how it paralleled Minka's life experiences during the Holocaust.
There were a few interesting twists (albeit predictable) and a few characters and storylines that I thought didn't add much to the story. I did enjoy that the story's ending was left for the reader's imagination. ...more

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