A review by mhall
The Book of Aron, by Jim Shepard

3.0

There's an old Lynda Barry Marlys comic that gets stuck in my head sometimes, a home ec class where Marlys and her cousin arrange their disappointing lemon squares in the shape of a cross, because "no one will give less than a B- to the shape of the cross." Similarly, it's hard for me to give less than 3 stars to a novel about a boy trying to survive in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust.

I felt the second half, about the orphanage, was much better than the first half. The whole story had a detached feeling, but it wasn't hard to read.