I loved this book, and I had a hard time putting it down. To some extent, it reminds me of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," as it delves into the psychological state of a man tormented by survivor's guilt, PTSD, anger, shame, revenge, violence, anxiety, etc., which eventually leads to a confession and surrender. Peter failed to unbolt the door to the building, and he believes this led to the Green Police arresting all of them and their eventual murders. He even assumes crimes committed by other Jews.

It is an amazing book idea: what if Peter, the boy who lived in the annex with Anne, had survived? Anne writes that Peter claims that if he survived, he would never tell anyone of his Jewish heritage, and so Feldman creates a story of a man running from his identity but learning to face the past and confront his trauma when in 1952, Anne Frank's diary gets published in English. With all the romanticized attention Anne Frank's diary received (from plays, movies, statues, even lawsuits), Feldman imagines Peter struggling with his own story being brought to light, especially when the movie presented his father as stealing food from the others. The Peter that Feldman creates takes on a lifeforce of its own--he seems so genuine, which is possible due to all the obvious research that went into this book. Peter loses his voice early on in the novel, and in a way, Anne gave him his voice back; but more importantly, Feldman granted him a voice, giving him a story to tell, allowing him to defend himself, his father, and even Anne.

The writer does a phenomenal job presenting the aftermath: those who struggle with their belief in a God after 6 million Jews died, or others who long to shoulder the suffering when they have no inkling of the horrors that transpired, and those who learned to despise their own heritage. She also depicts how disastrous it is for people to either overly romanticize the holocaust, like some have done with Anne Frank, or those who refuse to even accept the accuracy of what occurred.

The writing is superb. There are so many amazing quotes from this book, but I will leave my favorite passage.
“But I was not crying for anything in that house. I was crying for the innocence of that father walking home through the blushing Amsterdam evening, for the hope of that woman scrubbing a new flat for a new life, for the boy who thought he was safe. I was crying for a world that saw a war coming, that feared the worst, but had no inkling how bad the worst could be. I was crying for a world that, for all its misery, had not heard of concentration camps, or mass showers that spray death, or chimneys that spew human ashes, or medical experiments on men who happen to have red hair or children who happen to be twins. I was crying for a paradise I had tried to recreate for my wife and children, and myself, and for my failure. I cried for the second murder of my parents, the one I had committed by silence.”

I was looking forward to reading this book after having enjoyed Feldman's other novel, Lucy. However, I was highly disappointed by this book. The title of this novel is deceiving--I was expecting a story about the romance or friendship between Peter and Anne while in hiding and the impact of this relationship on Peter's and/or Anne's lives following the war. It may have been a more interesting twist if Feldman had wrote the novel as if in addition to Peter, Anne had survived the Holocaust as well. Instead, Feldman provides us with a rather boring account of Peter's life after the war and how he was so upset about his experiences during the Holocaust that he pretended he was not Jewish. For me, Peter was a very unlikable, unconvincing, and overly dramatized character.

I mainly liked this for the way it engaged with Anne Frank's diary and the play/movie and the larger discourse around that. Each chapter begins with quotes from some text relating to Anne Frank, either her diary or some secondary text talking about it. That's used to setup what that chapter will be about and it often directly addresses topics brought up in the quotes and responds to them. I thought this was really interesting because I feel like I haven't seen a book do that before.

Also, even though it is fiction, I learned some new things from this, mainly about the play and the movie. I'd read the play and seen the movie, but I didn't know much about them outside of that. Since this takes place during the time when the play and the movie were premiering it discusses their production and the contemporary response to them, which I didn't really know anything about prior to this and I found really interesting.

The only real negative I had was that I think the first and last ~25% of the book wasn't as good as the middle portion of it. It takes a bit to get going in the beginning and then loses a little bit of steam at the end in my opinion. I still liked the rest of it enough that it didn't negatively affect my opinion of the book too much though.

This book is very much a “book club” book, which is not to say it’s a bad thing, I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of books that would be considered “book club” books. I thought this book was just ok and was willing to rate it about 3/5 even if it was a bit predictable, but then I got to the author’s not at the end and felt a bit conflicted.

First the good, overall a decently-written book, a well-told story about trauma in the Jewish community in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, survivor’s guilt, and coming to terms with your past.

It also touches upon interesting themes related to the legacy of Anne Frank, how it has taken on a life of its own spawning a play and movie, the ways in which her legacy is at times misappropriated, and the people (very often men) who have argued over who is the authoritative voice on the life of Anne Frank.

Now to the bad, despite it being set in 1950s America, I didn’t feel rooted or transported into that time period, this could be in huge part because we spend so much time in Peter’s mind, but even so the lack of a sense of place and setting is one of the book’s weakest points.

Your interest in the book and in Peter also hinges on the fact that he was Anne Frank’s love interest, and a cynical part of me feels you could tell maybe 75 percent (maybe even 50 percent) of this story without evoking Anne Frank. While the release of Anne Frank’s diary and the effect it has on people who survived is an interesting premise to consider, I felt that Feldman could still tell a perfectly good story about surviving the Holocaust without hanging onto the coat tails of Anne Frank’s diary.

Anne Frank is a surprisingly peripheral presence in this book and it could be because of the theme mentioned earlier of how people claim to speak for her, but it just felt like Feldman probably didn’t want to wade into that debate either despite doing a whole book about just that.

And now to the major problem I had with this book, which is that while the book is based on the premise that Peter van Pels’ records couldn’t be found and we don’t know what happened to him (and this was based on a comment a guide for Anne Frank House made which inspired Feldman), we then get to the author’s note at the end to discover that Peter actually died in the Mauthausen concentration camp but at that point Feldman said Peter had been living in her mind for several years.

So much of this book hinges on Peter trying to seek redress of some form because his own father is portrayed in the diary, play and musical of Anne Frank’s life as not a nice person and as a bread-stealing thief, and that these inventions are to keep an audience interested.

For a book that explores what it means to misappropriate one’s legacy, knowing that the real Peter van Pels actually died made me go “well, isn’t Feldman doing exactly the same thing by completely reimagining Peter’s story even though at the time of writing the book she knew full well that he had died?”

For Feldman to still go ahead and write this book even though she knew he had died felt like a violation of Peter and that day a bit uncomfortably with me as a reader.