The Storyteller Paperback – November 5, 2013

5+ stars!Deeply moving, poignant story that brings the horror of the Holocaust to life. I've read Sophie’s Choice, and this is just as powerful.Ms. Picoult is a masterful writer. Her book delves into the lives of three people: Sage Singer, a reclusive young woman from a Jewish family; Josef Weber, a beloved 95-year-old member of the local community; and Minka, Sage's Polish grandmother. The characters live in New Hampshire in the present (or perhaps 2013, the date of publication), although the backstories are in Poland and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.Sage bears both facial and emotional scars, and she hides from the world as much as possible, working overnight at a bakery making bread. She also conducts an illicit affair with a married mortician. She has been attending a weekly grief support group for the three years following her mother's death, and this is where she meets Josef, who also comes to her bakery.Sage and Josef develop a friendship, but then he shares with her alone that he was part of the notorious German SS that murdered thousands of Jews. The memories are torturous, and he wishes to die, believing his longevity to be a curse rather than a blessing. Having attempted suicide unsuccessfully, he asks Sage to kill him. But before she does, he begs her, as a Jewish woman, to listen to his story, and then to forgive him. Obviously, this is a BIG ask.Josef recounts the path that led him to become such a monster, starting as a teenager joining Hitler's youth program with his younger brother, Franz. They became conditioned to obey blindly and to resent all Jews, who were perceived as being universally affluent while true Germans like Josef's family suffered in poverty. In gradual steps, Josef came to consider Jews as less than human and to treat them as such, making it possible first to damage their property, then to eject them from their homes and into government-created ghettos, then to ship them into prison camps, and finally to kill them en masse without guilt.Although Minka has never spoken of her experience, Sage has seen the number tattooed on her grandmother's arm indicating that she was incarcerated during WWII. Josef's confession leads Sage to seek out Minka's life story, and it's a chilling one. As a girl, Minka dreamed of becoming a famous writer. During the war, she became a kind of Shahrazad, crafting a tale that didn't end (it's interspersed within this book in italics), which gave her fellow captives a reason to live another day.The more Sage learns about what happened, the more conflicted she feels. The Josef she knows is a well-respected, soft-spoken, sweet old man who shares his bakery bread with his little dachshund. The man Sage comes to understand he was in his youth deserves no forgiveness, and he deserves to die. Will she kill him or won't she? Will she forgive him or won't she?The final pages reveal a jaw-dropper of a twist.There are additional storylines for other characters here that aren't well developed - the grief support group seems to be MIA when Josef and Sage could use help, the daytime bakery worker speaks only in Haiku (?? why ??), and there's a strange episode at the bakery where a loaf of bread cut in half reveals the face of Jesus on both halves, arousing media attention (again, ?? why ??). It's also not clear why Sage is virtually estranged from her two sisters.However, I have to give 5+ stars to any book as beautifully written and moving as this one.

Jodi Picoult's The Storyteller is a novel about families and how life orchestrates events that bind families together or rip them apart, sometimes simultaneously.The main storyline follows Sage Singer, a woman in her mid-twenties, who has withdrawn into herself after a series of major losses, including the death of her parents and the loss of her physical beauty from an accident that left a disfiguring scar on her face. Sage has chosen a career as a baker, allowing her to work alone during the night, leaving the daylight for sleep. She has limited interaction with her boss, a grief counseling-group, her grandmother, and a lover, who is a married man.In the grief-counseling group, Sage befriends a man in his nineties, Josef, who reveals to her that he was a Nazi SS Officer at Auschwitz, the concentration camp from which Sage's grandmother, Minka, a Polish Jew, survived.Picoult's story unfolds around the interactions of four families: Sage's family, including her relationship with her grandmother and her two estranged sisters; Minka's family and the horrific events they endured during the Holocaust; Josef and his family in Germany prior to WWII; and a character from a story created by Minka named Ania, a woman who falls in love with a vampire.This is the first Jodi Picoult novel I have read. I greatly admire her skill as a storyteller and a researcher. She crafted a novel I did not want to put down and creates beautiful prose: "I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet wheat. I imagine a shop with a bell over the window that rings when a customer enters; the sound of the coins dropping like a scale of musical notes into the cash register, which might make a girl look up from the book in which her nose is buried."I became emotionally vested in most of the characters, especially Sage and Minka. The stories never dragged, although a couple of events lacked verisimilitude, i.e., the loaf of bread Sage bakes that comes out of the oven with the face of Jesus on it and the fact that Josef never reveals his true identity to Sage.As I've said in other reviews, I am often annoyed when a talented writer changes the point of view numerous times throughout a novel, a technique that seems to me to produce a collection of short stories, rather than a full blown novel. I want to know a character inside and out, a hard thing for any writer to do well with just one character, much less four or five, and I wish Picoult would have focused only on Sage or Minka.Nonetheless, this novel is very well written and in the end, Picoult's transformation of Sage from a withdrawn, injured character into a strong, confident, loving individual who understands self-acceptance and forgiveness is a beautiful story worth reading. I highly recommend it, and I look forward to many hours of enjoyment reading Picoult's other novels.