Here is my Buy-It-Yourself Easter egg. I have had hideous flu for what seems like weeks, a run in with the people publishing my novel, and nothing jolly planned for the Easter weekend so feeling pretty sorry for myself, and have decided to jellywobble my weak little flu legs up to the local supermarket to buy myself an Easter egg. Yes, sadly, I have to buy my own … here it is!! Can't wait for Sunday morning when I wake up and discover if the Easter bunny has been to visit me. (I suspect he will have...) This Monty Bojangles egg was on offer in Sainsburys - a gigantic crate of them selling super fast - so I grabbed one, quick. My daughter gave me a Monty Bojangles salted caramel/coconut/something truffle a couple of weeks ago (yes, just one! which I had to more or less wrestle out of her hand) and wow, super yummy it was, too! So very excited to try these. . . I suspect I should get out more.
The book I was reading whilst chomping down on my luscious truffles was, in exceedingly poor taste, The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. Hmm. Obviously a terrible story, regardless of how it is written, but it didn't make the impact on me that it seems to have on so many other readers. I don't want to read something so harrowing that it will make me have sleepless nights and bad dreams, on the other hand I do want to read something that entirely engages my emotions, and this didn't really do that. I have, myself, written about hideous circumstances and desperate acts (cannibalism) and appreciate that it is very tough to get the balance right (- not saying that I have - just that it's difficult.) The thing about Holocaust literature is that we are all so familiar with the appalling imagery and unspeakable cruelty that a lot of the background in this novel comes across as just kind of familiar and a bit so-so. An amazing story, and as a factual account of events, it does a straightforward, easy-to-understand job. But as for engaging me on a deeper level, of saying something new about the human condition it didn't really work that well for me. I read that the author is primarily a writer of screenplays and actually, this is just how it reads – as a script treatment – more about the sequence of events than the characters. A bit disappointing.
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