Reviews

Caging Skies: A Novel by Christine Leunens

takayda's review

challenging dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

kfrench1008's review

2.0

I was very disappointed in this book. While I wasn't expecting it to be exactly like Taika Waititi's film version, I thought it would at least have a similar tone or message. But the film is about how love and friendship can change someone for the better, the book is a dark look at love as an obsession. Not my cup of tea.

kitandkat's review

3.0

I HATE JOHANNES.

Ok that's over. Overall, to me the book was kind-of meh. The narration wasn't really my style but wasn't poorly written. Like others, I liked the first half of the book although I would've appreciated more details/anecdotes (it seemed to skim over a lot compared to the second half). The second half was definitely much darker than the movie. In some ways it was an interesting character study. In others, I actually felt like JoJo Rabbit was a more complex character because he seemed truly good at heart and brainwashed, while the Johannes of this book turned, imo, truly evil. I don't necessarily regret reading this book, because it offered a unique perspective, but I didn't exactly love it.

carmenghia's review

2.0

I adored the movie JoJo Rabbit. It was hilarious, and it was also heart-wrenching. And I deeply cared about JoJo, Elsa, and JoJo's mother in the film. I laughed out loud, I cried real tears.

So, this is the book that JoJo Rabbit is based on, and though the seeds of that script are in here, but that script and movie are definitely the product of the mind of Taika Watiti and the film is so much better for it.

Johannes in the book is just an awful, awful person. The war ends about halfway through the novel and Johannes continues to hold Elsa captive, is abusive to her, and is terrible to everyone, really. If you loved the film, I think it is highly unlikely you would enjoy this version of Johannes.

erine's review

4.0

I read this over several days in which I also watched the movie - JoJo Rabbit. While the twisting humor and shadowy terror were similar in both formats, the book takes the story too far (as in too far past the point when it should have ended) and the movie takes the story too far (too far into the absurd). And yet neither of them were really too far, because what is “too far” when you’re talking extremism, fanaticism, selfish disdain for the humanity of others, etc.

A difficult read that warps simple notions of good and evil in a very dark and discouraging way. The movie left me feeling more hope in the midst of tragedy, but the book dragged me down and held me under. This portrayal of a narcissistic young man living in Austria during WWII was in many ways more disheartening than reading about the many ghettos and concentration camps. The tepid bravery of Johannes’ parents was not enough to overcome their son’s speedy embrace of Naziism, nor the icky feeling of Johannes’ doing the right thing only because it happened to serve his own ends, and more often doing the wrong thing in order to serve his own desires.

Despite the utterly depressing tone barely leavened with a sense of humor and biting criticism, it was a unique portrayal of the intersection of reality and madness.


Notes while reading:
Reading this gives me chills. It paints the lure of white supremacy, including the idea that you are unique and valuable to the race war, even if no one else values you. Shivery, indeed:
“We learned new, frightening facts. Life was a constant warfare, a struggle of each race against the others for territory, food and supremacy. Our race, the purest, didn’t have enough land—many of our race were living in exile. Other races were having more children than we were, and were mixing in with our race to weaken us. We were in great danger, but the Führer had trust in us, the children; we were his future. How surprised I was to think that the Führer I saw at Heldenplatz, cheered by masses, the giant on billboards all over Vienna, who even spoke on the wireless, needed someone little like me. Before then, I’d never felt indispensable; rather I’d felt like a child, something akin to an inferior form of an adult, a defect only time and patience could heal.”

Phew. Okay. Parts are painful, but then there’s this:
“Nothing’s as necessary to existence as diversity. You need different races, languages, ideas, not only for their own sake, but so you can know who you are! In your ideal world, who are you? Who? You don’t know! You look so much like everything around you, you disappear like a green lizard on a green tree.”

I don’t know that I ever heard before that Kristallnacht began because of a rumor that a Jew had killed a German embassy official. Smacks a little like an American lynching, in which any excuse is taken for violence against an imagined enemy.

“Feelings were mankind’s most dangerous enemy. They above all were what must be killed if we were to make ourselves a better people.” They are making cybermen: erasing all feeling... to flip that on its head, how can we as a society encourage feeling? Encourage empathy?

I am at the point where Johannes’ father returns from questioning, believing he has been denounced by his son. How terrifying and sickening to be so afraid of your own child. But children are so inherently inconsistent, living with such a limited understanding of the world. How could parents not be afraid?

“If I could have stopped time I would have, but time is the greatest thief of all: It steals everything in the end, truth and lie.”

katiethehood's review

...this book was not. at. all. what I was expecting based on the movie and I have a hard time looking at it objectively because of that.