Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Beautiful writing. I was hooked!
A perfect read for the summer holidays.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

I came to this book, as many readers probably will, via the critically acclaimed film that it inspired; 'Jojo Rabbit'. As such it is difficult to review without comparing the two. If you liked the film, will you like the book? The answer, in my opinion, is not necessarily. I should say upfront that I loved the film, to the extent it's one of the best I've seen. But I tend to be someone who enjoys reading more than watching, so I expected to love the book too.

The book and film are very different. The book covers a much longer time period, stretching from before the war until five years afterwards. The narrator, Johannes, is a child in the film (which covers only about the last year or two of the war), whereas in the book he seventeen when the war ends. There are characters in the book who aren't in the film, and vice versa. Besides these obvious spot-the-difference changes, the two are stylistically very different. Whilst the film is extremely funny, although darkly so, the book is not. I'd go as far as calling it humourless. The film is also very moving, perhaps because the comedic elements throw the tragedy into even sharper relief. Wheres I found it hard to engage emotionally with the book at all.

Part of the problem is Johannes. In the film, his childish innocence contrasted with the evil of the Nazism around him. The Johannes of the book is older and much less cute, which changes the tenor of actions into something more cynical and sinister. I found it hard to like him or even pity him. The other characters lack depth and we never get to know them, even Elsa, the Jewish girl who is hidden in their house. The book has a much more insular approach than the film - the only characters given any real airtime are those within the household, and most of the action takes place under the same roof. Even Elsa, who should be sympathetic due to her situation alone, is impossible to warm to.

The other problem is the plot, or lack thereof. The war ends before the novel is halfway through. The tragedy and drama and natural tension that arose from that period vanishes with it. I was left wondering what the story would be about - it seemed to have peaked much too soon. The answer was, not a lot. Rather than the heart-wrenching tale of children endangered by war that I expected, this is essentially a novel about a dull, claustrophobic relationship between two deeply unhappy and flawed people, who rarely get out and are entirely dependent on each other. It is joyless and I wanted it to end even more desperately than they did.

The underlying idea behind the story is not bad - you can tell that from the quality of the film. But the execution just lets it down. It's quite believable, but not it's not enjoyable to read. Ultimately, I would not recommend the book to readers unless they are particularly interested in stories about difficult overly-dependent relationships.

Leunens' "Caging Skies" is truly a book of two halves; whilst the first part was absorbing and gave fascinating and poignant insights into both the effects of propaganda on young boys in the Hitler Youth and the pandering to the masculine pride, the second half is not as solid albeit taking a dark turn.

This is a fantastically dark, compelling parable. It feels dangerous to read: a transgressive Sleeping Beauty. Johannes, the unreliable narrator of this macabre work, is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth before he gets injured and decommissioned. Realising that his parents are hiding a Jewish girl in their house without his prior knowledge, he starts to entertain dark fantasies about an imagined relationship with her. What ensues is a depraved, at times uncomfortably tender love affair, incumbant upon lies, deception and control. This is such an unsettling juxtaposition of the mundane and the grotesque, that the reader’s moral compass is left disorientated, perhaps dismantled. I found Christine Leunens’ prose both masterful and challenging in its intent and as a study in dependency and obsession.

In 1930s Austria, Johannes is a young boy who idolises Hitler, the new leader of the people who's going to make Germany (and Austria with it) great again. He joins the Hitler Youth as soon as he can and puts his all in to it, enjoying both the outdoorsy activities of the group and the feeling of belonging and kinship it brings. At school the things children are taught begin to change, and soon Johannes is spouting Nazi ideology as fact to anyone who'll listen. Johannes is fully convinced of Hitler's ideas on the master race, until he discovers his parents are hiding a young Jewish girl behind a wall in their home. He begins to develop feelings towards the girl which causes him to question everything he's come to believe under Nazi rule. Which path will he follow and which future will he choose for them all?

I really liked the first half of Caging Skies; At the start of the novel you really feel for Johannes as he navigates his way through growing up during the Nazi occupation. He's so young and naive, and I thought this was a really brave and fresh take on at how easy it would have been for some children to grow into perpetrators and collaborators. For the most part the Hitler Youth must've seemed amazing to kids at time and why would they have questioned what they were being taught at school? Nazi ideology infiltrated every lesson, from maths to home economics, and this novel is a great interpretation of how children must've experienced this.

As the story goes on I continued to enjoy it up until the point where *SPOILER* he loses both parents. After this I found it less believable and more and more bleak. I also found that deaths were dropped in without warrning and then glossed over, so you could almost miss them if you weren't reading carefully enough. Considering Johannes loses all of his family members you think he'd spend a little longer dwelling on it or feeling more grief. It was odd, but then I'm not sure whether that's done on purpose to show that he's odd? I also disliked Elsa and found her really difficult to sympathise with, which is some feat considering her predicament, and I'm not sure whether that was intentional or not too. She comes across as a spoilt brat but then maybe that's because we're seeing her Johannes' eyes.

The plot seems to make jumps and the narrative doesn't always make sense because of it; Elsa goes from not being interested in Johannes to suddenly being in some sort of relationship with him out of nowhere. A relationship with a neighbour is also alluded to but again, I'm not sure what we're supposed to take from it. It could be the author was trying to illustrate Johannes' paranoia but it's very unclear and personally I dislike that in a book.

Overall I think the concept and idea was a good one but the book faltered as it went on. I'm not sure how else the story could've gone but it just seemed too farfetched. I almost wish the author had spent more time writing about Johannes's childhood in the Third Reich, and the finding of the girl behind the wall had been the ending. The first few chapters would make great reading in History classes but after that it's one of my favourite reads.

The premise for this sounded so interesting but the further I got into this book, the more I got bored with it as the main character was not that exciting and he really could have been more of a presence seeing as this was meant to be about him. The point when the parents left, I lost interest as they managed to move the plot along even though they were meant to be secondary characters. This had a lot of potential but this kust need to be edited to make the Johannes a more compelling lead character.

I knew this was adapted for a Taika Waitit film and as a result I was interested in its sense of humour and fun. However, the book is entirely different to the film's core premise and as a result was a very different kettle of fish. The first half of the book chronicles the thinking, situation and development of a young boy in Austria following its annexation by Germany under Hitler's reign. The protagonist finds himself in the youth movements and groups, burning books in Hitler's name and venerating him as a god. As time passes, he comes to learn that his parents are harbouring a girl in their home, keeping secrets and operating as part of a Resistance which he is entirely outside.

In the second half of the book, with the removal of some of the main characters from view, the protagonist lapses into obsessive desire and control, inhibiting the freedom of his effective captive and living a dark, miserable tale.

I liked the first half of this, but the second lost me to a great degree. I felt the author had a good grasp of the child's voice, but the later depictions of her characters are more tenuous.

I picked up this book after I learned that it had been made into a film by writer/director Taika Waititi. The book does not bear much resemblance to the film as seen in the trailers. The protagonist is only a child for the first few chapters of the book; he soon grows up, leaving little room for humour. Rather than showing us a boy radicalised by propaganda, it shows us a man who embraces the teachings of the Hitler Youth for a long time after Hitler's death. Any sympathy I might have had for a protagonist who cheats and steals in order to stay alive is lost the second they turn their sights towards the most vulnerable. The narrator of Caging Skies is a pathological liar and manipulator who also manages to be totally hapless, charmless, and honestly, boring. He completely lacks self-awareness; if he were real and alive today, he'd probably call himself an incel. If you struggle to finish a book with an unlikable and unreliable protagonist, this book is not for you.

Johannes gets sucks into the ideologies of the Nazi party when Austria becomes part of the Third Reich, and these ideologies are put to the test when he finds his family is hiding a Jewish Girl in the attic.

When I saw this was to be made into a movie, i expected a lot from it but unfortunately is disappointed.

The first 1/4 was really interesting, learning more about the Hitler youth, more about the ideologies and what that did to the family. However, from then on I felt it really dragged and when something major did happen in the storyline it was glossed over in a few sentences!

All in all, this could have been an excellent story but just didn't enjoy the pace.

There's a really intriguing premise to this book: our first person narrator is a passionately dedicated Hitlerite from childhood who becomes disturbed by his own feelings as he obsesses about a young Jewish girl.

Leunens is clever in terms of perspective, playing with the fact that we tend to empathise with a first person narrator, seeing the world through his eyes. Here, though, there's a slippery relationship since the narrator joins the kids' version of the Hitler Youth and comes home to lecture his parents on his abhorrent views.

The narrative is tight and claustrophobic with another story being told between the lines of the one the narrator is telling us. It's clever but it also feels very 'told' - I like the obliquity, but found the actual book a bit too long and drawn out in getting to where it's going.