ALL THE BROKEN PLACES
JOHN BOYNE
© 2022 Pamela Dorman Books
$28.00
400 pages

There are just certain things that are nobody's business. And in the new novel, All the Broken Places by John Boyne, some secrets must last a lifetime.

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby hated the idea that she would have to adjust to new neighbors.

She wasn't so much bothered by new people as she was by new noise. And what if the new tenants had children? That was the worst of all. Gretel never was much one for children, not her own and certainly not any living below her.

Once, there was a time when Gretel could imagine herself with many children. That was nearly eighty years ago, when she was in love with her father's driver, Kurt. She thought about Kurt through the years — he had fallen out of favor with her father and was sent elsewhere — and she wondered if he'd survived the war.

But Gretel didn't think about those things much. What happened at the "other place" was not her fault.

She hadn't known. She was innocent.

That was what she told herself as she and her mother fled to Paris. Gretel was 15 then, and she worked hard to get rid of her German accent, but not everyone was fooled by her bad French or her story. She was accosted, hated.

As soon as her mother died, she sailed to Australia, where she lived with a woman who loved other women, until it became dangerous there too. She practiced her English and moved to London, where she was married and widowed

And now she had to get used to new neighbors and new sounds and new ways for old secrets to sneak into a conversation...

The very first impression you get of Boyne's main character, Gretel, is that she's grumpy, awful, and nasty. Along with the many bon mots she drops, however, the feeling passes, and it's sometimes easy to almost like her — although it's clear that she's done some vile things in her lifetime, things that emerge slowly as the horror of her story dawns.

Then again, she professes to dislike children, but (no spoilers here!) she doesn't, not really, and that makes her seem like someone's sweet old grandmother.

Don't let that fool you, though. Boyne has a number of Gretel-sized roadside bombs planted along the journey that is this novel. Each ka-boom will hit your heart a little harder.

This is a somewhat-sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but you can read it alone. And when you finish, you'll want to immediately read it again, to savor anew.