If I must be honest I found The Storyteller to be a slow starter. I really didn't get into it until about halfway through when Sage's grandmother began to recount her story as a Holocaust survivor. The horrors that she endured broke my heart. It is simply impossible to understand how anyone could treat another human being in such an inhumane way.
The discussions in this book about good and evil, and about how bad people can feel remorse and can become something different were so real! Although it is impossible to relate to anything a Holocaust survivor might have to deal with, I do remember how years ago my local church had a pastor who was quickly and quietly asked to leave our church. I never knew what transpired but I understand it had something to do with an affair, or perhaps more than one affair with women in the church. Years later we wanted to have this pastor officiate at my father's funeral because the children in my family viewed him as one of the most incredible spirit-filled people we had ever known. What a surprise when the church asked us not to contact him, and we began to learn a little bit about the things that caused him to leave our church. But to us he was a GOOD man - and it was almost impossible to recognize the fact that he hadn't always made the right decisions.
Sage's connection with the man who had inflicted such pain against her grandmother but had been a friend to her really made me pause and consider how so many of us have two sides to reconcile. Of course, most of us are not reconciling anything as horrific as the brutal torture and killing of thousands of innocent people, but most of us do have incidents in our lives where we behaved badly and regretted it.
As I read The Storyteller I had a chance to consider the terrible wrongs that the Jewish families faced. It's so hard to come to terms with the terrible events that took place at that time. Reading this book will put you face-to-face with those horrors.
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