Jason Furman's Reviews > The Book of Aron

This holocaust novel told from the perspective of a boy in the Warsaw ghetto is well executed, sometimes moving, but still falls short of what I was hoping for from the reviews. Part of the problem is that although the setting and perspective are somewhat different from previous Holocaust novels, somehow it seemed to fall into the same exact patterns and thus while almost a wrenching work of history (and most of The Book of Aron feels like it could be a plausible set of events, in fact one of the main characters and his orphanage in the ghetto was real), it did nothing to expand the boundaries of the novel. Maybe that is an unfair standard, and it is certainly worth grappling with the enormity of the horror and the evil through just about all the means available to us, but somehow I felt like I had already read the book many times before.