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    The Storyteller
    The Storyteller
    The Storyteller
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Storyteller

    Written by Aaron Starmer

    Narrated by Erin Moon

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Keri Cleary is worried about her brother, Alistair. "Everyone" is worried about Alistair. As the one witness to a shooting, he has been shocked into silence. But everyone needs to know three things: Who shot Kyle Dwyer? Where is Charlie Dwyer? What does this all have to do with the disappearance of Fiona Loomis? Perhaps the answers lie in stories. As Alistair makes strange confessions to his sister, Keri becomes inspired. She tells stories, tales that may reveal hidden truths, fiction that may cause real things to happen. In the concluding volume of the Riverman Trilogy, readers are asked to consider the source of inspiration, the borders of reality and the power of storytelling. They are asked to forgive monsters, to imagine alternate dimensions, and to believe in a phosphorescent wombat who assures us that gone for now is not necessarily gone for good.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 15, 2016
    ISBN9781501919077
    The Storyteller
    Author

    Aaron Starmer

    Aaron Starmer is the author of numerous novels for young readers, including The Only Ones and The Riverman. He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.

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    Reviews for The Storyteller

    4/5

    884 ratings97 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I knew this was going to be a hard read but it was a really hard read with the detailed info of the Holocaust. I had to put it down and then I'd pick it right back up because I wanted to keep going. It would get hard again and I'd put it back down again only to pick right back up. I thought that after all the book led up to the ending was a little bit of a let down but it did have a surprise!
    • 5/5
      This was very good. Didn't really go where I expected it to. You travel back and forth between the war-time Germany and today.Fairy tale, aging SS officer, strange love story.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book! I loved how she intertwined several stories into one. I loved the charming narrators used in the audiobook!!!
    • 5/5
      Like a lot of Picoult's books this book has several story lines. The present day is of Sage Singer,a baker, who works nights in a bakery. Sage meets and befriends, Josef, an elderly gentleman, in the bakery, in the morning, as she is leaving. Sage's only family nearby is her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. As Sage gets to know Josef, he confides in her he was an SS officer in the German military. Sage has mixed feelings about this as she likes Josef and he is respected in the community, but her grandmother survived being in a concentration camp. Finally, after much debate and listening to Josef's story, she decides she must turn him in as a war criminal. This book has many twists and turns and typical of Picoult a surprise ending. Very well-written, excellent story.
    • 3/5
      Good read but predictable ending
    • 2/5
      I approached this book with reluctance as I hated Sing you Home and couldn't even finish Lone Wolf, however I was pleasantly surprised at the level of research Ms Picoult has undertaken in order to tell this gripping tale of the holocaust. There is a bit of poetic license taken, and some parts are exaggerated, but generally it is a real improvement on her previous offerings. Not a literary masterpiece, but an enjoyable tale nonetheless.
    • 5/5
      Should a Holocaust grandchild forgive a former Nazi SS officer his crimes?
    • 5/5
      Astonishing book. Beautifully written, a brutally vivid and intensely personal account of the holocaust combined with a separate but related redemption story and with a third story embedded as well. What a page-turner! This was my first experience with Picoult, but I don't think it will be my last. Thank you, Audrie, for recommending this book!
    • 4/5
      Wow. Horrifying but I loved it. I really like the way Jodi Picoult writes. Pay attention. If you listen, you will know. Will be hard coming down from this one.
    • 4/5
      Very intense and well researched book about a German Nazi asking forgiveness from a Jew.
    • 5/5
      Sage Singer uses the scars on her face to hide from the world. She works as a baker during nighttime hours, and is almost crippled by the shadow of her mother’s death. Her Jewish grandmother was in Auschwitz and is a survivor of the Holocaust. An elderly man from her grief support group who befriended Sage has just confessed to being a member of the Nazi SS who served at Auschwitz, and asked Sage to help him die. Powerfully told, this story explores several perspectives. Very well done.
    • 4/5
      The StoryTeller is a Goodreads Choice Nominee for fiction 2013, and deservedly so. It is told through the differing point of views of Sage, Minka, and Leo. At the beginning of the novel we meet Sage Singer, a girl who hides herself away working nights in a bakery. She is badly scarred from a car accident, and prefers the solitude of baking bread to engaging with people. Alone in the world after the death of both her father and her mother, she speaks only to the other workers in the bakery and the grief group attendees. At the grief group she meets Josef. A man well into his nineties, who appears to be a sweet old man, well-respected by the local community. He too is alone in the world, his wife has died and all he has left is the unconditional love of his dog. This unlikely pair of grieving souls form a strange friendship, drawn together by the deep scars in their lives, Sage's visible, Josef's hidden. Josef's scars have been inflicted on others. Deep wounds, that he carries within his soul, and seeks release from.


      The shocking twist in the tale comes with Josef's revelation. He is not at all what he appears to be. In fact nobody would believe that this pillar of the community was an SS Officer during the Second World War, who worked in the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz. To make matters worse Sage's grandmother is Jewish, and was also at Auschwitz. Sage has not been an active member in the Jewish faith, and works alongside an ex nun. Josef reveals that he wants Sage to help him die. Sage struggles with her conscience and decides that the right course of action is to contact Leo Stain, a Nazi criminal war hunter.

      At the core of the StoryTeller is the concept of guilt. Both Sage, and Josef are guilty. Josef's guilt is on a massive scale, so therefore cannot ever be forgiven. Sage feels a sense of guilt,and this guilt is caused by events that may or may not have caused the death of her mother. Her guilt drives her away from the remaining members of her family. Both Sage and Josef hide,driven out of sight by their remorse.It is interesting that Jodi Picoult elects thatJosef, the heinous war criminal, is the one to hide away by adopting a new persona. Moreover he gets away with it for many years. It is evident that his actions as a war criminal are still engrained in his psyche, he knows how to survive.Whereas Sage, still bound and scarred by her own sense of guilt, chooses to distance herself from people. She is the one who disappears out of sight, who is invisible. Yet her guilt is miniscule in proportion to Josef's terrible actions as an SS officer.

      Part two of the novel relates Sage's grandmother Minka's story. I found this part of the story, a shocking progression from Minka's happy childhood memories, to the ghettos, and then to the starvation, deprivation, and sheer terror, of the concentration camps. Jodi Picoult has obviously extensively researched this period of history, and creates a moving and absorbing tale in Minka's story. It works so well. She manages to create believable characters whose pain and suffering become so understandable, and poignant. I did find myself wiping a tear away, whilst reading the second part of the novel, so you've been warned!

      As if this is not enough, Jodi Picoult adds into this mix yet another story of a creature, the Upior, who tears humans apart. This story is Minka's tale. The story within the story does much to illustrate the horror of what man does to his fellow humans, behaving like a beast.

      I also found layers of meaning in the references to baking in the novel. The simple things in life like a freshly baked piece of bread or patisserie, made by a loving parent, can be taken away from you in seconds and replaced by unimaginable horrors.

      There are many threads and points of view interwoven into the plot. So this is a novel that works best for close rather than light reading! Can a Nazi war criminal change? Obviously whatever he has done now to make amends cannot wipe out the terrors of the atrocities that he must have committed. Leo, is the one that keeps this point of view firmly in place, even though at times we see Sage struggling with the same dilemma.

      The conclusion of the story focuses on Sage, and her ongoing process of delivering Josef to the authorities. In this part of the book, we learn that Sage struggles with Josef's confession, and questions of morality are debated via her character. There are major spoilers at the end of the book, so I will not spoil your reading of it by even hinting at them. Just suffice it to say, this is a very thought-provoking book, that I would highly recommend to Jodi Picoult fans, and to readers of historical fiction, it's a must.



    • 5/5
      Emotionally draining, yet powerful story. This was a very human, personal account of the Holocaust, survival, and forgiveness. I highly recommend this book.

      Reread 3/25/19 - 3/26/19 This story is wonderfully written. Sage Singer is a troubled 25 year old who is scarred from a bad accident. She is mourning the death of her mother, and is distanced from her 2 older sisters. She escapes her troubles by having an affair with Adam, a married man (funeral director from her mother's funeral) and baking on the night shift at the town bakery. She meets Josef Weber, a kind, elderly man who is in her grief therapy group. Josef asks her for a favor that will change everything. Sage's grandmother, Minka, is a holocaust survivor, and tells Sage about the horrors of the time in the camps.
      Redemption, forgiveness, survival are all in this wonderful book.
      #TheStoryteller #JodiPicoult
    • 5/5
      Love historical fiction about WWII. Narration of more than one person's view is always a plus.
    • 5/5
      I have read several books on the Holocaust, I think most of them were written by survivors but this historical fiction one that centered on a few characters Jodi Picoult's book goes back and forth through time from the start of the Hitler's Youth to modern day. Having watched a documentary about about Hitler' Youth, all of it rang completely true. But Jodi Picout brings the story of two brothers growing up in it home. In current times, Sage carried deep inside her the emotional scars of the day that her mother died. Her face is disfigured on one side. so she stays away mirrors and most people, even her family. She prefers the solitude of the hours where she works in bakery in the back. Sage meets a man in his nineties and starts to know him as a friend, chatting with him when he comes to bakery. she had been having a long affair with the married funeral director who she met at her mother's funeral. Except for the ex-nun who is the owner of the bakery, nothing much exists for her in her self-imposed isolation. This story gets more complicated when her new friend reveals that he was a Nazi. Sage's grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. This very intense story, especially when Sage's grandmother starts to tell of her life as a young girl and then in the concentration camp had me with tears streaming down my face. After the whole tale was, I could easily understand why the story was too painful to tell her family and why she wanted to be free to live in the present instead of the horrible past. I have met a survivor myself and his family always said that he never talked about his experience. For me, the Holocaust should never happen again but also it is so horrible that I can understand why survivors want to shut the door on the past forever.Forgiveness, what does it mean and who can give it? Love of a friend so deep that you feel like your heart has been torn out when the friend dies. These are just a few things deeply explored in this book I highly recommend this book for an understanding of how the Holocaust could happen and the deep of sorrow that the families and survivors feel. There is so much more to move you deeply and for you to think about in this. I just ask that you either read it or listen to it.
    • 4/5
      Sage is a baker and a loner. When she goes to a grief couselling session, she becomes friends with Josef, a ninety-something year old man. It’s not long before Josef confides in Sage that he was a Nazi. He would like Sage to forgive him (after finding out she’s Jewish), then “help him die”. This was very good. It alternated viewpoints between not only Sage and Josef, but also Sage’s grandmother, who had been in a concentration camp, and Leo, a detective who hunts down war criminals. Should I admit that I didn’t like some of what Sage was doing to Josef, who now trusted her with a pretty big secret? Surprisingly, I figured out the twist about half-way through.
    • 5/5
      The Storyteller tells the stories of Sage, Minka, and Josef and how their lives are intertwined in this greatly written novel. The book has two timelines - the present and the time of the Holocaust. Sage, a baker whose grandmother was a survivor, got befriended by a former SS officer in hopes that she could forgive him and assist him to die (because she is the closest thing to a Jew around the area). I enjoyed reading this 460p novel. It comes in 3 parts. If you want to read what happened to the Jews, how they were treated during the war, their lives before the war til the day of the liberation, go to Part Two. It is heartbreaking til the last page of the whole novel. It is beautifully written, I couldn’t say anything more.
    • 3/5
      Writers never cease writing about the atrocities of WWII, and Jodi Picoult continues this practice. This novel centers on Sage Singer and her friendship with Josef Weber. Sage and Josef meet during grief management sessions. The reader does not learn the full reason for Sage attending this class until very late in the story. Josef professes to be a former SS soldier responsible for thousands of deaths and asks that Sage assist in ending his life. Picoult does an excellent job in relating the story with chapters by Sage, Josef, Minka-Sage's grandmother, and Leo-the Holocaust investigator. The true story of the horror emerges. Is atonement necessary? The ending is not shocking, as I had expected this outcome, but the stony path creates vivid memories of human suffering.
    • 5/5
      I love Jodi Picoult. I can honestly say, she doesn't disappoint. The Storyteller weaves an intricate tale about Sage, who is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and the "friend" of a SS Officer. Her emotions are twisted and turned and flipped inside out as she decides whether to help her friend, Josef end his life or to turn him into the authorities as a war criminal. As the story unfolds, she learns that her grandmother not only know Josef, by another name, but that Josef was an officer at the camp she was held captive, and that he killed her grandmother's best friend...or did he?
    • 3/5
      There's much to like in this tale of two damaged Jewish women, a grandmother and granddaughter, who both carry visible scars of internal baggage. "But see how much of me is left?" the grandmother asks the younger woman at one point, sending a message that the latter is slow to grasp even though she does grasp it by the end. At the same time, however, some story elements were handled in ways that detracted from the whole, keeping me from giving it the fourth star that a part of me really wanted to give it. First off, Picoult chose to devote far too much time to the grandmother's backstory during WWII, especially given that the grandmother didn't seem to be the focal point of the story. It was almost as if Picoult had a novelette written and tucked away and chose to adapt it as a part of this larger effort. As a result, it was almost necessary to go back and get reacquainted with the present-day characters once the massive amount of backstory was completed in the middle of the book. In addition, a significant plot twist that ties the grandmother's backstory to the present day is projected a bit too much, taking away from the effect that should have been generated by the eventual reveal. On the plus side, Picoult takes shots at some shades of gray and at Justin Bieber, so she has that going for her. In the end, there is much to like in this one, but the way that the past and the present are handled hurts things and makes the whole less than the sum of its parts.
    • 5/5
      Like her other stories, Jodi Picoult takes a headline from the news and examines all the moral, and human implications of it. In this story, a young woman struggles with issues of guilt, innocence, forgiveness, evil, and redemption in dealing with an ex-Nazi nonagenarian. Parts of the book are truly horrifying as Picoult details what life was like in the Polish ghettoes and the concentration camps. The novel includes an allegorical story within a story and the way Picoult weaves so many elements of the past and present, while throwing in a love story and plot twists,show that she's the master storyteller.
    • 5/5
      Powerful story, well told. This is my first Jodi Picoult book and it was excellent. I guessed the twist at the end, quite a bit before nearing the end, but that didn't make it less readable, and perhaps not all readers would guess the same. The story is sufficiently complex to hold one's attention. I won't summarize it again, as it has been reviewed many times, I suspect. The setting is modern day with parts of it set during the Holocaust at concentration camps, so we know the background of characters. Thoroughly enjoyed this book.
    • 5/5
      This Is a book I chose to retread due to all the historical events and tremendous content. I actually listened to the audio version the first time. I liked hearing the German spoken when it appeared in the book, but after rereading it in hard copy, I realized I missed a lot and didn't experience "deep reading" from the audio. This book is a masterpiece and not just another Holocaust book, but a read that certainly plays with all your emotions and thought processes. I see this on the big screen, but how could a movie ever do justice to the book or the survivors.

    • 5/5
      Sage Singer becomes friends with an old man who's particularly beloved in her community after they strike up a conversation at the bakery where she works. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. One day he asks Sage for a favor: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses, but then he tells her he deserves to die. Once he reveals his secret, Sage wonders if he's right. What do you do when evil lives next door? Can someone who's committed a truly heinous act ever redeem themselves with good behavior? Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren't the party who was wronged? And most of all--if Sage even considers his request--is it murder, or justice? (summary from ISBN 1439102767)This story is spellbinding. The subject matter is difficult to read. But, the book raises some very important questions about choices we make and the consequences of those choices.
    • 3/5
      A somewhat affecting Holocaust story, well written, but too much in the Picoult formula to be memorable.
    • 4/5
      This is different than any of Jodi's previous books. This one tells the present story of Sage and then also goes back to WWII and the story of two Nazi brothers and also Sage's grandmother a Jewish Holocaust survivor. I don't want to give anything away but I will say there are the typical Picoult twist and turns and surprises. I wanted to read this in one sitting but had too many interruptions. Very good book and I recommend it. The book is called The Storyteller and Jodi is quite the storyteller.
    • 4/5
      One of my granddaughters is a big Jodi Picoult fan. I had bought this to give her but found out she already had a copy. She told me it was the first book she had read of Picoult's and I should read it. So I did.

      I had to take my time with it. Some of the subject matter is deep and not always easy reading. I don't mean technical or philosophical but more like graphic, to me.

      Sage Singer feels guilty for the death of her mother in a car accident when she was driving. She bears facial scars that make her self-conscious. She works night as a baker to avoid having to deal with people. She is still going to a bereavement counseling group after three years.

      At the group she meets Josef and they develop a friendship. He is in his 90s and is there because he lost his wife. They have that in common. But Josef has another reason to be there and that comes out later when he asks Sage to do something for him. Something that is not so simple as making a cup of tea or a nice loaf of bread.

      This story is written from a number of viewpoints; Sage, Josef, Sage's grandmother Minka, and Leo. They all have connecting threads that spin around World War II and the holocaust. The sections telling of life as a Polish Jew in the camps are strong. The revealing of the connections comes about slowly but not dragging.

      Picoult's style moves you along but allows you to go a your own pace. Parts you want to read quickly and parts you take your time. Over all a goodread.
    • 2/5
      My experiences with Jodi Picoult books are really hit and miss. I just couldn’t sympathize with the main character, Sage. Reading a book about someone is like spending time with them, and I didn’t want to spend my time with (to be perfectly blunt and perhaps snarky) such a loser. I didn’t think I would be able to finish the story until the FBI agent, Leo, showed up – however, his role as Sage’s love interest was painfully obvious.

      I think that first person narration was a bad choice with such a depressed narrator. Sage just seemed like an excuse to tell Minka’s Holocaust story, and I would have much rather read that without the embellishment. Minka’s vampire story was interwoven throughout the book, and was just downright confusing until nearly the end. Just a hot mess.

      Jodi Picoult has many excellent books, some of my favorites are Plain Truth, The Pact, Perfect Match, My Sister’s Keeper and Second Glance.
    • 3/5
      I was not very pleased with this book. Real testimony from survivors is much more interesting and more credible than the experiences Picoult portrayed. There were a few interesting twists provided, but not enough to make either the vampire tale or the Holocaust experiences worth reading. I would not have felt that way if the experiences had been written by a survivor.
    • 5/5
      Over the past few years I have become very disenchanted with Jodi Picoult's books and after the last one I read, said I was not going to read any more written by her. Thank goodness, I didn't follow through. "The Storyteller" was a truly riveting story centred around the Holocaust, with thought-provoking questions about forgiveness and justice. There were a number of narrators, but the one I found most compelling and tragic was young Minka's as she described her battle to stay alive while imprisoned in Auschwitz. From the start, I was hooked on this book and found it hard to put it down. A fabulous read.