Sarah's Key

Sarah's Key tells the story of both Sarah, a ten-year-old Jewish girl living in Paris during the Holocaust, and that of Julia, an American expat living in France sixty years later.

One night, Sarah and her parents are rounded up by the French police. Sarah hides her little brother in a cupboard, locking him inside, placing the key in her pocket, and promising she'll return for him.

Julia is a journalist tasked with the story of the Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup of 1942. As she uncovers France's dark and embarrassing past she uncovers a link between Sarah's life and her own.

While the premise of this book was wonderful, and the storyline quite well written, I took issue with the mindset of the main character. Throughout the book, it was no secret that Julia's French husband was mentally abusive, controlling, and conceited. I immediately lost patience with her tolerance for him. All it took for her to keep allowing him to treat her that way was for him to look handsome and act attentive for a few moments.

I was hoping that Julia was allowing herself to go through her husband's abuse and infidelity throughout the story because she was going to learn her lesson and begin to value herself in the end... a "girl power" moment, even if it were too little, too late. That didn't happen.

The following may contain spoilers...

Julia's husband, Bertrand had been carrying on a relationship with another woman throughout their marriage. She tolerated it, which I found disgusting. It wasn't until Bertrand's mistress' children were old enough to move out that he finally left Julia to move in with her.

Bertrand had been angry with Julia for years because she couldn't conceive a second child, but when she finally got pregnant with a healthy baby, he didn't want it, and it seemed that Julia wasn't smart enough to realize he was only taking that stance because he was about to run out on her.

Way too much of the main character's self-identity was hinged on men and bearing children. It was as if she couldn't stand in her own power as a woman. Even after she shook her good-for-nothing husband she described sex with her new boyfriend as "...something I now did because I felt I had to." What a terrible message to put out into the world!

Julia spoke of her new baby as if it were a consolation prize to a terrible failed marriage, and she even said: "I especially missed the way French men check women out, what Holly called their 'naked' look," and spoke of feeling "empty" because men weren't catcalling her anymore.

It's a shame that what could have been a powerful story was cloaked in one woman's unrecognized self-loathing. Even at the end of the story, she was crying over a man she had only met briefly and "took off" with her baby, into the cold, the second he called her. Upon meeting up with him Julia discovered that this man was divorced but had a new girlfriend he described as "controlling," (more anti-feminist bullshit) yet she was rubbing knees with him under the table. Maybe she deserved all the pain Bertrand had given her after all.

On top of all of this, the big reveal of the story could be seen a mile away, because Julia kept referring to her infant as "the child." It didn't take a lot of imagination to guess who she was named after.

Even with all of Sarah's Key's anti-feminist messages and it's way of portraying the French people in a terrible light, both in the past and present, Julia's daughter, Zoë was a breath of fresh air. She was smart, intelligent, and independent. She was the strength of her family. At least readers were given that.