The Wrong Boy | Suzy Zail

I’ve been trying to work out what I want to say about The Wrong Boy for a couple of days now.

The writing was pretty good, the story was exactly as you would expect for a teen romance/holocaust story and the history was accurate. But I was uncomfortable the whole time I was reading it.

I’ve read quite a lot of Holocaust literature over the years. It is a subject I return to regularly, almost obsessively at times. I am not Jewish or German, and I have not lived through a world war. But ever since my first real brush with Nazi Germany in my Year 9 history class I have been on a mission to understand how the Holocaust could have happened.

My head, heart and soul are continually searching for the answers to how & why it is that –

_{Hanna Mendel liked to know what was going to happen next. She was going to be a famous concert pianist. She was going to wear her yellow dress to the dance on Saturday night. But she didn’t plan on her street being turned into a ghetto. She didn’t plan on being rounded up and thrown in a cattle truck. She didn’t plan on spending her sixteenth birthday in Auschwitz, in a wooden barrack with 200 other prisoners. Most of all, Hanna didn’t plan on falling in love with the wrong boy.}

_{What happens when a Jewish girl falls in love with the German son of the camp commander? Award-winning Australian author Suzy Zail’s young adult fiction book, The Wrong Boy, paints a story of identity, romance, hate and loyalty alongside the historical backdrop of the Holocaust. This gripping novel about a teenage girl coming to terms with first love amid the confronting realities of a war-torn world will leave readers wanting more.}