Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

I adore Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Mass Market Paperback) and have read it multiple times over the years. Anne's diary has come to mean different things to me as I've grown older - when I first read it as a ten-year-old girl, I was fascinated by the hidden life she led with her family and there was a sense of dread and excitement about her precarious circumstances, the danger of being discovered. When I read Anne's diary again as a teenager, I came to empathize with Anne's frustrations with her mother and the other adults around her whom Anne felt did not understand her and treated her as a child. I felt Anne's desire to be 'heard' and not just treated as an inconvenience or child was so much aligned with what I was going through during adolescence.

When I re-read the diary as an adult, I came to appreciate all the other things - the tragedy of having lost such an amazing and talented young voice in the most horrible of circumstances; the beauty of Anne's writing which is all the more amazing given how young she was when she wrote this diary; and the themes of alienation, fear, and hope. Now, as the mother of a young daughter, I read this diary again and gain another fresh perspective - of the complex relationship between daughter and mother. Anne had a strained relationship with her mother Edith, and clearly gravitated toward her beloved Pim (father). This was obvious even before Anne and her family were compelled to move into hiding in the Annex. As a mother, reading Anne's thoughts about her mother (often unflattering) was a disconcerting experience, though things do improve somewhat later on.

Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl is a classic not only of Holocaust literature, but also a classic Young Adult read with its myriad themes that will appeal to both adolescents and adult readers.