Inkflower

July 15, 2024
A fictionalized adaptation for teens of the Holocaust survival story Zail shared in her self-published adult memoir, The Tattooed Flower (2006). Switching between Australia in 1982 and Europe during the Holocaust, this work presents two distinct first-person narratives connected by one life. The late-20th-century storyline is a work of shallow realistic fiction about teenage Lisa, whose comfortable life is disrupted when her beloved father is diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The World War II storyline follows Emil, a Jewish boy from Czechoslovakia who manages against all odds to live through multiple Nazi camps before eventually emigrating to Australia. Only Emil comes alive on the page; Lisa exists mostly as a collection of '80s pop-culture references and feelings about her father's revelations. Until his diagnosis, he never revealed his childhood experiences to her. Other characters, including Lisa's Hungarian mother (whose own Holocaust story is barely mentioned), serve only as window dressing. And yet it's impossible not to feel the palpable loss as Emil grows sicker and parcels out his past over the course of one Shabbat after another; his experiences (largely drawn from Zail's father's life) make the novel succeed despite its other flaws. Major characters are coded white; jarringly, given his own experiences with being dehumanized, Emil describes arriving in Australia and hoping "to spot a kangaroo or a black man with a spear." An important but unevenly told story. (author's note, Holocaust and ALS resources)(Historical fiction. 12-16)

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Starred review from September 1, 2024

Gr 8 Up-Based on the author's experiences, this novel is both extremely personal and extremely universal; everyone eventually will lose someone close to them, and almost everyone eventually realizes the past is not as simple as the history books say. In 1982 Australia, 16-year-old Lisa comes to terms with both these facts when her father, after a terminal diagnosis, begins to tell the story of how he came to Australia after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust. Showing the dichotomy between the flashy 1980s and struggling WWII-era Eastern Europe allows both locales to have their own flavor and light. The way Lisa reacts to different parts of her father's story, and how she tries to keep her own feelings about his declining health and revelations of his past from her friends for fear they won't understand, are heartfelt. The chapters are labeled "Now" when they are told through Lisa's eyes and "Then" when they are told in first-person through her father; the font changes during the "Now" chapters as her father's illness takes away his ability to speak. Though readers will know the endings to the parallel stories right away, the journey shines in this novel, as well as the will and perseverance to live. VERDICT Equally heartbreaking and uplifting, this recommended book reminds readers that a forgotten past is irreplaceable, and the present is a gift.-Jessica Durham

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