At the beginning of this year, I decided to enter a challenge through Goodreads. I sifted through my ever-growing list of books that I want to read and pared it down to 85ish books that I felt I should've read by now, that looked interesting or a like light read, or that I thought they might have an impact on my life viewpoint. The most recent one that I read was Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. I'm almost ashamed to admit that it took me this long to get around to reading it.
Now that I've had a few days to mull it over, I think I'm finally ready to review this book.
Anne
Frank wanted her diary to be published. She had dreams of being a
writer. Her father, the only one of the Secret Annex group to survive,
edited and published her diary for the world to read and I thank him for
that. The diary is an open, honest, and sometimes harsh view of what
life was like for Jews during the war. Anne doesn't hold back her strong
opinions while writing in this diary.
As the book is a diary,
the writing is somewhat disjointed at times but you can clearly see the
development that Anne undergoes as a person during the two years while
writing in the diary. You can really get a feel for the kind of person
she would have become if she had survived.
This book made me
question a lot of things; the reasons behind the war were the biggest
ones, and to a lesser extent, the things going on in my own life. I
teared up every time Anne referred to what she wanted to do in the
future for her career or how she was going to raise her children. After
seeing some of her hopes and dreams and realising just how short her
life was cut, I started questioning things that were going on in my life
and what I wanted to do. Although this wasn't what the book was
designed to do, it made me up my rating to five stars. Any book that
makes you question things in yourself has to be amazing.
Thank you Anne. I appreciate it. Rest in peace.
