Annelies - David R. Gillham (Spoilers)

(This book is impossible to review properly without the use of spoilers, so please come back and read this once you've read the book if you'd like to avoid this :) )

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As you might imagine, this book all but leapt off the shelf of the dollar store and into my TBR pile based on the title alone. Who else could it refer to but Annelies Marie Frank? Longtime readers may remember that Anne and the Holocaust were my reading theme back in June 2015, and while I don't claim to be up to date on all of the books about Anne and her family and friends that seem to pop up regularly, I had never heard of this work of speculative fiction from 2019. 

The premise is intriguing: what if Anne had survived to be liberated from the Belsen concentration camp? The author has obviously done a lot of research, and the first third of the book follows the real story so readers who haven't read the Diary and other related books millions of times like I have get all the key information needed before the fictionalized account begins. I won't lie, I was sort of equally psyched to read this, and also nervous - what if the author bungles the storytelling and it annoys me? 

In the end, I thought the author did a decent job overall with this story. I liked that the helpers (Miep, Bep, Kugler, and Kleiman) were called by their real names. I also liked that the chaos following World War II wasn't sugar coated - there was no "movie ending" where the war ends and things are perfect; the world was in disorder and it wasn't easy for people who did survive to simply reintegrate into the society they had been forced from with the idea that they would not live to return to it. 

I am not sure what to think of the subplot of Otto Frank getting remarried to a fictional character invented by the author - he did remarry after the war, but I guess it worked as a writing device to keep things moving on. And thank goodness the author did not burden us with any sort of s3x scene (you never know with books that are trying to provide a "coming of age" story since that pretty much always seems to just mean "has relations for the first time"). The subplot where Otto has Anne's diary and waits a long time before giving it back to her was too dragged out in my opinion - while the author provided a good reason for this in the context of the story he was telling, I feel like Otto would have given it back to Anne right away if she had actually survived. But who knows. Anne also seemed sort of bratty and that seemed to go on a bit longer than I feel like it had to, but again, there is no way to know if that is realistic or not. 

All in all I can say it was worth paying $1.25 to read this - and now I guess I should seek out any other books about Anne I may have also missed.