Book Review- The Storyteller

I finished reading The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult yesterday on my cruise.

From Goodreads:

Sage Singer befriends an old man who's particularly beloved in her community. Josef Weber is

everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. They strike up a friendship at the bakery where Sage works. One day he asks Sage for a favor: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses…and then he confesses his darkest secret - he deserves to die, because he was a Nazi SS guard. Complicating the matter? Sage's grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.

What do you do when evil lives next door? Can someone who's committed a truly heinous act ever atone for it with subsequent good behavior? Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren't the party who was wronged? And most of all - if Sage even considers his request - is it murder, or justice?

I've read all of the books by Jodi Picoult so far and loved almost every one so I couldn't wait to read this one.  But I had such I hard time with it.  Jodi Picoult's books always deal with moral choices, as did this one.  But it was about such a serious topic. I've always been intersted in the Holocaust.  And that's what this book deals with.  So I couldn't just plow through it like I normally do.  It seemed like it was almost more of a non-fiction book and those take time for me to read.

Sage was only okay to me.  She was a loner and honestly, I never really got that into her.  But I really liked Leo.  He was perfect for Sage and his humor cracked me up.

 And you  know what?  I know that the Holocaust was truly horrifying.  I've done so much studying on it but there was a part of me that felt bad for Josef Weber.  And I was conflicted.  On one hand, I thought Sage was too cruel to such an old man who wanted forgiveness.  But on the other hand, I didn't want him to seem like such a nice old guy.  I wanted him to seem more like the monster that he seemed to be during the war.

And the grandmother--reading her account of what she went through was gut wrenching and horrifying.  So much so that I can't say that I enjoyed this book.  Like I said before, yes, its fiction, but it just read too real for me.  And I need a difference in my books.

I gave this book a rating of 3/5.

This book fulfills items in the following challenges:
2013 150+ Reading Challenge: 20
2013 Mammoth Book Challenge: 2

 *FTC Disclosure: I traded this book with a friend.