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Writing about a moral issue like slavery or the Holocaust from the pespective of the time before they became the moral issues they are today is impossible, isn't it? Even when we read contemporary accounts from that past, our perceptions cannot help but be colored by our present. Yet that is what Boyle attempts to do here.

He further tries to distance the story from any immediate moral judgment by employing the voice of a nine-year-old boy. Once we know we are in Berlin in the late 30s and early 40s, and that the boy's father is a high ranking army officer, however, it's hard to be too surprised by anything that follows. And even without prior knowledge of the book's subject matter, I would have guessed where and when the story took place pretty quickly.

Perhaps Boyle tries a little too hard. The transliterative device of Bruno's childish mispronunciation--calling "der Führer" the Fury and Auschwitz "Out-with"--seem inauthentic, and the central tenet of his plot--a friendship between an child inmate of that concentration camp and the son of its commandant--is farfetched at the least.

But I'm an adult and maybe those devices will work with someone who comes to the book with less background knowledge. Boyle is particularly good at making the characters who are children--Bruno, his older sister Gretel, and Shmuel--come alive on the page. And his ending--an allegorical twist--is powerful.