JIM SHEPARD

The acclaimed National Book Award finalistone of the United States finest writers, according to Joshua Ferris, full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiositynow gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust. Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo. When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of childrens rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escapeas his mentor suspected he couldto spread word about the atrocities? Jim Shepard has masterfully made this childs-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Arons voice will remember it forever. From the Hardcover edition.

Small and sullen, Aron is eight years old when his family moves from a rural Polish village to hectic Warsaw. At first gradually and then ever more quickly, his familys opportunities for a better life vanish as the occupying German government imposes harsh restrictions. Officially confined to the Jewish quarter, with hunger, vermin, disease and death all around him, Aron makes his way from apprentice to master smuggler until finally, with everyone for whom he cared stripped away from him, his only option is Janusz Korczak, the renowned doctor, childrens rights advocate, and radio host who runs a Jewish orphanage. And Korczak in turn awakens the humanity inside the boy.

Bajo la pancarta que da la bienvenida a los nuevos alumnos de octavo curso hay un letrero que dice: NINGÚN ALUMNO FRACASADO y un folleto que ofrece OCHO MANERAS DE SER INTELIGENTE. Para el adolescente Edwin Hanratty, a menudo tan hilarante como desdichado, esto forma parte de todo aquello que convierte la escuela de secundaria en una especie de pesadilla implacable. Y así, junto con Flake, su único amigo, pugna con una pandilla tras otra -los deportistas que les dan una paliza, las chicas que les ignoran o les ridiculizan-, así como con las atenciones obstinadas y desconcertantes de un crío de sexto curso más marginado aún que ellos. Y aunque los padres de Edwin se esfuerzan por comprenderle, él y su amigo Flake se enfrentan a una desmoralización tan absoluta que no tienen otro refugio más que sus propias observaciones amargas e incisivas sobre todo lo que les rodea. Hasta que paulatinamente comienzan a coquetear con la más horrible de las venganzas, una venganza que nadie olvidará contra los compañeros y profesores de su escuela. Este impulso letal, que tantas veces ha conmocionado a la sociedad estadounidense (especialmente desde la matanza de Columbine que inspiró tanto las películas de Michael Moore y Gus Van Sant como esta novela de Jim Shepard) nunca ha sido objeto de una credibilidad tan espeluznante como en Proyecto X, que sugiere que el principal dilema de estos muchachos no es tanto su odio hacia el mundo como su atormentado y constante amor por él.