Let me add my vote to the "yesses" for this book. Hegi draws her characters with unusual depth. She populates the whole town with a mixture of people that anyone who's lived in any community can recognize, in mixtures of selfishness and selflessness that anyone who's looked into their own soul can recognize.

This is one of the most original and deeply "human" epics I've ever read. A must read.

I had to read and annotate this book for AP language/composition. It was the worst book I have ever read in my entire life.

Some books disappoint on a second reading, but not this one. When it came time for my book club to read this book I was very excited, because I remembered that I really liked it the first time I read it. And I was not disappointed. I think I liked this book at least as much the second time around as the first.

This is a story with two contrasting themes. One is difference. Told mostly from the perspective of Trudi, a dwarf, who feels how different she is from the members of her community on a daily basis. And she sees how difference in others is persecuted under the Nazis.

The other theme of this book is community. One thing I really liked about this book is how we come to know so many members of Trudi's community throughout their lives. We understand as well as Trudi does why certain members of the community do certain things, because we have known them almost as long as she has. Hegi does a wonderful job of bringing the whole community to life.

And she is more than equal to the task of describing what the advent of Nazism does to this small German community. She does not shy away from the people who enthusiastically embrace Hitler and his party, but she does portray in a more sympathetic way those who at least question Hitler's policies.

Rather than making a judgment call, though, based on how her characters respond to the Third Reich, Hegi seems more interested in demonstrating the range of responses that existed in a small town, and how those differing responses change the character of the town itself.

This was my book club's choice last month, and probably not a book I would have picked up on my own. But I enjoyed it. It was a little hard to read with a lot of German words stuck here and here, and a lot of characters to keep track of. But you were rooting for Trudi throughout the book. Got an understanding for what a small person goes through on a regular basis. It also painted a great picture of Nazi occupied Germany, and not only what Jews went through but how good German people did what they needed to, to survive and keep their families alive. I sometimes wondered what was going on in those towns outside the concentration camps and why they didnt ask what was going on..have a pretty good picture now why.