The Dairy of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: Book Review

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have to be honest; I almost gave up on this book a couple of times. It’s going to sound ignorant but I had no idea what Anna Frank’s story was really about and no, I’ve never seen any of movies based on the book either. I always thought it was based on a diary of a young Jewish girl who was in a Nazi Concentration Camp during WWII. Instead it’s about her life with her family and another family who go into hiding in Amsterdam during the German occupation in the Netherlands.

Frank was 13 years old when she started her dairy. For the most part it deals with her teenage angst as she goes through puberty. She’s the typical teenager who thinks her Mom is an idiot who doesn’t understand her and a Father who loves her but is emotionally unavailable.

Frank writes about the daily mundane life in hiding, co-existing in cramped quarters with others, the lack of privacy, the fear of being discovered, the food etc. But it’s her on target descriptions of what it’s like to be a very intelligent teenager trying to grasp the world, the politics of the time and most of all her puberty. She may be only 15 years old but her insights are as mature or maybe more so than the adults she’s in hiding with.

At first I said to myself this book is for chicks, for teenage girls and for Mothers but as I got deeper into it had a lot to say about the feelings and frustrations of young girls dealing with the fury of puberty. It’s a great book for both sexes because if you read and absorb what it’s trying to say it’ll help you as a parent to better deal with that very delicate time in a teenager’s life.

I wish I would have read this book about 15 or 16 years ago, it would have helped me better understand my own teenage Daughter. In most cases women are at least 10 years ahead of men on the maturity scale and this book just craves it in stone.

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