Yellow Star is a haunting but strangely beautiful Holocaust narrative - Jennifer Roy tells the true story of her Aunt Syvia, who along with her family, is forced to spend the war years in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Syvia spends her life from ages four to eight years in the ghetto and we see events through her eyes as she develops a slow but increasingly horrific comprehension of her circumstances and the deadly and perilous situation that she and her family are facing. Only 800 of the 270,000 ghetto inhabitants survived until the end of the war and of those 800, only 12 children including Syvia, lived to see liberation. Roy chooses to narrate the novel in first person blank verse, creating an atmospheric and deeply personal telling of her Aunt's story. Despite its grim subject matter, Yellow Star is also very much a story of hope, strength of family, love and how these attributes can combine to triumph over the most unspeakable of circumstances.
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