<P> Kathryn Hughes, writing in The Guardian, calls the novel "a small wonder of a book". While she comments on "the oddness of Auschwitz security being so lax that a child prisoner could make a weekly date with the commandant's son without anyone noticing", she describes the novel as "something that borders on fable", arguing that "Bruno's innocence comes to stand for the willful refusal of all adult Germans to see what was going on under their noses". </P> <P> Nicholas Tucker, writing in The Independent, calls the novel "a fine addition to a once taboo area of history, at least where children's literature is concerned . It provides an account of a dreadful episode short on actual horror but packed with overtones that remain in the imagination . Plainly and sometimes archly written, it stays just ahead of its readers before delivering its killer punch in the final pages ." </P> <P> Ed Wright, writing in The Age of Melbourne, calls the novel "a touching tale of an odd friendship between two boys in horrendous circumstances and a reminder of man's capacity for inhumanity ." He felt that "Bruno's friendship with Shmuel is rendered with neat awareness of the paradoxes between children's naive egocentricity, their innate concept of fairness, familial loyalty and obliviousness to the social conventions of discrimination ." He concludes by observing that "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is subtitled A Fable and, as in other modern fables such as Antoine de St Exupery's The Little Prince, Boyne uses Bruno to reveal the flaws in an adult world ." </P> <P> A.O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, questioned the author and publisher's choice to intentionally keep the Holocaust setting of the book vague in both the dust jacket summary and the early portion of the novel, writing: "Boyne's reluctance to say as much can certainly be defended, not least on the grounds that the characters in a story about the Holocaust are themselves most likely unaware of the scale and historical importance of their experiences . To recreate those experiences faithfully might require undoing some of the readers' preconceptions ." However Scott felt this undermined the work, saying: "A young reader who knows little or nothing about the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis will not know much more after reading "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," while one who has read other books on the topic--Jerry Spinelli's "Milkweed," say, or Anne Frank's diary--may be irritated by the book's evasions and euphemisms . There is something awkward about the way Boyne manages to disguise, and then to disclose, the historical context ." Scott concludes that "To mold the Holocaust into an allegory, as Boyne does here with perfectly benign intent, is to step away from its reality ." </P>

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