What readers think of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, plus links to write your own review.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is interesting and at the same time informing. I like to read non fiction but when a fictional story is based on a historical event, then its a win win situation. Overall The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a very good book. If you are wanting to get informed on Holocaust I suggest this book. One thing that you will need though, is background information about the Holocaust, not too much information, just the basics.

I thought it was brill. I would recommend it to anybody.

I thought that this book was amazing. I thought that this book would be another one of those horrible books that we are forced to read in school. It was by far most my favorite school book ever! Though my favorite books are the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyers. The boy in the Striped Pajamas was heart wrenching. The book was constant thinking and the ending really surprised me! I thought that Shmuel would be the only one who would be killed. It was a shock to me. The movie ending was interesting, I guess that they had to tie it with a Hollywood ending but I preferred the ending of the book. It left many open doors for the reader to think what occurred after.

I think that this book is marvelous and a great book to read and to show not to judge someone one how they look better to judge them by who they are and to show what the Jews went through.

"The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" was first brought to my attention by a friend who had picked it up in the local library knowing nothing about it. She thought it such an addition to the literary cannon that she advised me to read it.

The novel is set mainly in a rather famous German Nazi concentration camp, where many jews were inhumanely murdered, but also the setting takes us to Berlin.

The reader experiences the War from the perspective of a rather pompous, sometimes irritating, innocent and always somehow profoundly baffled 9-year-old boy called Bruno. We, the reader, are with him as he and his family unit make the move from Berlin to the concentration camp, where his father, The Commandant, is to be in charge.

The boy in the striped pyjamas could refer to Schmuel, a Polish Jew who Bruno befriends on an adventure. There friendship survives the separation enforced by an obtrusive wire fence. In Bruno's innocence he does not realise that Schmuel is a prisoner of the German Empire, and that he is there to be murdered.

A real sense of innocence and the clarity and reality it brings pervades this work. This can be seen in Bruno's lack of understanding of why a Doctor should be waiting on table for he and his family, and in the metaphor of striped pyjamas, which of course alludes to the uniforms that the Jews were forced to wear.

Fearing an imminent return to Berlin, and the loss of his friend, Bruno has one last "adventure" where he and Schmuel would finally be able to play together. Bruno breaks under the fence to play with his friends adopting the striped pyjamas also. Whilst in the camp the Nazi soldiers round up a group of men and boys, including Schmuel and Bruno and they are taken to a hut were they are gased. This is all described to us chillingly through the innocent and childish vehicle of Bruno.

I have read review after review of this book with people stating that this book is not for 9 year olds. I simply don't agree.This novel is universal. The style of this book is simple and clear for any reader. Properly taught to the young by a tutor, teacher, or willing parent this book should become an instrumental work for the children of this country, and indeed the rest of the world.

Indeed in Ireland, where division and discrimination have reigned for so many years, it is vitally important.

This novel illustrates to children and adults alike, the stupidity of war, the ignorance of discrimination, be it racism between black and white or what you will. This novel brings simplicity and an amazing clarity to achieving peace.

This work by Boyne is a universal moralistic and anti-discriminatory contribution not just to the cannon but to society; from child to adult.

This work tells us not to judge on appearances.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is the 5th novel by Irish author John Boyne. It is a holocaust tale from a different perspective: that of the naïve and innocent young son of a concentration camp commandant. He asks his father when they arrive if his father has done something bad at work to be punished in this way, being sent by the Fury to this awful place, Out With. Bored, and missing his friends in Berlin, Bruno eventually sets out to explore, and meets, on the other side of a big fence, a boy in striped pyjamas. It is a friendship with tragic consequences. The device of using a child’s narration to describe something he cannot understand, but that is perfectly clear to the adult readers, is a clever one, but some glaring inconsistencies make this story less credible than it could have been, and perhaps detract from its strength. Bruno seems too naïve for a German 9 year-old in 1943, especially about Jews and Hitler; the idea that Shmuel has the time and opportunity to sit alone by the fence daily seems very unlikely; that the fence is not regularly patrolled, and that it has a gap the size of a small boy, again unlikely; the other children in this novel also seem far too naïve. The Fury and Out With, I can accept as a literary device, and these are effective, in their way. Inconsistencies aside, Boyne does depict the setting very skilfully and builds the main character well. As a Holocaust fable, I guess it gets a message across, but I’m not sure for whom or what exactly that message is: maybe, tell your children the truth, don’t try to protect them from uncomfortable facts? I enjoyed reading it but I thought The Book Thief was much better.

According to me, I didn't found this book very interesting as it consisted of too many characters by which I got confused...this is a good book too for those who like suspense and horror...by the way I didn't expect horror, but it is in the end...I didn't like the book much but it's good for small children...that's why I rated only 3 out of 5...all the readers must read"GODFATHER" by MARIO PUZO....it's an excellent book I think.. :-)

In my opinion this book is very vague. How can John Boyne confuse the difference from an innocent boy to an idiotic boy? The boy should have asked his father in the first place about what was going on in Out-With. Also the author makes it frustrating because of the cliff-hanger technique he is using constantly. You might say that I am only a teenager that read this book because of WWII, but in my defense it is the truth. But of course this book had amazing facts about WWII and how people were tortured and killed by Hitler and his tricks. But honestly the book could have expanded on Hitler, and his whole army of what was truly going on. Maybe it could have told us about Hitler AND his wife for less than 40 hours Eva Braun.