The Diary of a Young Girl

I had been meaning to read this since last year but I just kept putting it off and getting sidetracked. It is really difficult lately for me to sit and crack open a book and read for more than 10-15 minutes. I'm highly stressed out and my mind is racing with so many jumbled thoughts. So I got the audiobook version read by Selma Blair from Audible and finished it in a couple days. It was really everything that I'd always heard plus so much more. It's the sort of book that any female entering her mid to late teens can pick up and feel instantly connected to the author. Anne Frank wrote about what was happening outside the secret annex but she mostly focused on real things - feeling unloved and misunderstood, having questions about sex and candidly discussing her desires and thoughts, and especially moments of frustration with her mother. You'd be hard pressed to find a female who didn't butt heads with their mother during adolescence and her writing about this felt very universal. Anne was a solid writer with so much promise and I couldn't help but get teary-eyed at so many moments where she discussed her future, knowing that there was no future. Yes, she lives on in the written word but I kept wishing that the last entry would discuss those in the annex finally being liberated. I longed for descriptions of the men who would rescue them and tell them that the war was over and the Nazi regime had fallen. But it ends with separation, humiliation, degradation, starvation, fear terror, illness, cruelty, death, and her corpse being tossed into a mass grave. Completely devastating.