„The Boy At The Top Of The Mountain” by John Boyne

By Teodor Zaporojan

„Although Pierrot Fischer’s father didn’t die in the Great War, his mother Émilie always maintained it was the war that killed him.”

The book that you are about to acknowledge is no ordinary book. It is a book about World War II, but not one about the war itself. It is a biography of a victim, but not one of a usual victim. It is a book about Adolf Hitler, but not about him. It is a book written like none before. And the emotions it transmits are like in no other book.

„THE BOY AT THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN” tells the story of Pierrot, a young French orphan, which is taken under the wing of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, living in his mountain retreat at Berghof, in Bavaria. Surrounded by faithful Nazis and traitors alike, Pierrot gets his name Germanized and becomes indoctrinated in the Nazi idealism preached by Hitler himself. While Pierrot has everything done for him, at the flicker of an eye, living in great luxury, he loses the bigger picture of reality from his sight, having his conscience and innocence stolen away from him in a brutal manner. He betrays his own aunt, a Nazi traitor, turns against Jews, yet having a Jewish friend in childhood, and getting power at a raw and young age, by all this situations, Pierrot’s contamination with lies and secrets is greatly shown. A sad and shocking story of how children can be turned into monsters by manipulation and false idealism, the action of this book is fortunately with very small chances of actually having happened in the past.

In my opinion, this book is an excellent historical and psychological thriller. It is one of those well-written what-if books, and the fact that it has come from John Boyne’s imagination makes its words nearly magical. Besides being a historical fiction, it is a fascinating Bildungsroman, or character-formation novel, and the sequence at the end of the book which presents Pierrot as an older man, seeking redemption for his actions and deciding to share his story with his childhood Jewish friend, now turned a successful writer, this sequence only shows again the finesse of the plot and writing.

Therefore, I recommend this incredible book as your next reading!