Book #125: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

I loved this book when I was in middle school and high school, and I can't believe I haven't read it since then. I loved how well you got to see into Anne's soul, and how she describes both the petty and the deep problems that she and her family faced in their time in hiding. I remember being so amazed by her easy discussion of sexual topics (or what she was learning about them), and how she fell in love and how she wrote about it. She writes so vividly about the fear they felt when there were break-ins or chances of being overheard of discovered. It is very obvious that she was just a teenager as she wrote this, how she feels so misunderstood and not included and poorly treated, and how she writes about how she hates her mom and dad sometimes, and how she makes some generalized, sweeping statements about the world and about her goals (which are so easy to make when you are so young and idealistic!). But it is also amazing to see how she grows, and what she learns over the three or four years of the diary. If this were a fictionalized version, the writer would have had Anne write about the day they were discovered and captured and how she was so afraid and what was going to happen to them--and I can almost imagine what she would have written. It always made me so sad to get to the end and remember that they were captured, and to realize that her goals and dreams about her future would never come to fruition. She said many things in her diary about "this is only the very beginning of a long, full life," and it's heartbreaking to realize that those things are not true. But it is also poignant that her diary has a life of its own now, many years after she died, and that her dreams of being a famous writer did come to fruition.

Besides those bigger, deeper thoughts about Anne's diary, I was interested this time in some of the minutiae. She mentions many times about how they couldn't flush the toilet during certain hours, like during the day when workers were in the building, and at night when nobody was supposed to be there, and how terrible it smelled. You never think about those small, really annoying issues that would bother them and make their life so much more difficult, because those really are overshadowed by the overwhelming fear and stress they must have been experiencing every day while in hiding, but those things still have a day-to-day importance. I also was really impressed by all the things Anne did to keep herself busy while they were stuck indoors inside their tiny hideaway for those years. She was very self-motivated and worked hard to study so many different subjects, and I think that was so impressive and showed her work ethic and determination not to be bored or to fall behind.