Don’t Believe It by Charlie Donlea Sidney is a documentary maker who gets onto a case of a woman, Grace, who was accused of killing her boyfriend on a trip to Saint Lucia. She is accused and convicted faster than anyone can blink, so Sidney looks into it and makes a real time docuseries about the murder and whether or not Grace really killed her boyfriend. While she's releasing episodes she's reinvestigating the case on her own. She ends up providing enough doubt that they have to release her. But then we start to wonder if she really did it or not. Sidney learns that Grace had a boyfriend in high school who died the exact same way. It had me second guessing until kinda close to the end who the real killer was.
All the Broken Places by John Boyne This was a read for book club, and I didn’t realize it was the sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I had read that one a zillion years ago even though I think it was geared toward the young adult audience. In that book a German family moves to Auschwitz because the father is the commandant of the camp. The son befriends a kid who lives inside the camp, and he ends up sneaking into the camp to help the boy find his father and never comes out. So you can guess what happened to him, as he was mistaken for a child living in the camp, and the family then has to confront what they were really doing there once it happened to one of their own.
In this sequel, All the Broken Places, the story is about Gretel the daughter. When she’s 14 she lives with her family at the camp and embraces what it means to be in the Nazi party and is starting to be interested in the boys who are wearing the SS uniforms. Of course she doesn't even think twice about this, as this is what she's supposed to be doing in this world where she learned that being white and non-Jewish was the best thing she could expect to be. Then the war ends and her dad is tried and hanged for his crimes, Gretel and her mother escape to Paris. But Gretel can never really escape her past. She is tortured by the memory of her brother and has to strictly hide her identity because everyone will consider her complicit in the crimes against humanity that were committed at the camp. And it led to a really great discussion about whether she really was complicit in all that was going on at the time. It’s an interesting story about hiding in plain sight, then as a 90 year old woman she comes out with everything. Very very well done.
BJ Knapp is the author of Beside the Music, available for purchase here. Please sign up for the Backstage with BJ Knapp mailing list to get updates on events, signings, dog pictures and so much more.