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• When I heard that the BBC were serialising this book, I thought I should actually find time to read it first. I’m glad I did. Anne’s account of her time in the secret annexe with her family and others in hiding is funny, heartbreaking, poignant. She is of course a brilliantly direct writer and this reads exactly as it should – the diary of an ordinary young girl living in extraordinary circumstances. It is also a very domestic story, by dint of being about eight people forced to live together in less than ideal circumstances. It’s probably one of the truest accounts of teenage yearning I know, perhaps because it is a real diary. All through the book I kept thinking, would this book be so poignant if Anne had survived? Probably not, but it would still be an important record of wartime life. Would the book be as good if it were fiction and not true? Again, probably not. The joy of the book is that there is no structure, beyond the necessary day by day entries. A fiction writer would be tempted to add some kind of story arc. The diary is what it is, a slice of someone’s life. Often, Anne talks of the frustrations of marking time until they are free again and the reader cannot help but wonder if she would have felt the same if she’d known how short her future was going to be. Those instances are heart-rendingly sad.Ann's diary is about the trivia of everyday life and the enormous events going on around her; it's about the small things and the big things - her annoyance with her parents for failing to understand her, and her proto-feminist ideas about the rights of women. At the end of the diary I simply had one question: what would Anne have become if she had lived?

  5.00 out of 5

  yellowoasis

• This is the diary of Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944 and Anne Frank ultimately died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This true life story of a great tragedy in history is an exceptional view into the life of a young girl that had to live this first hand. This would be a great book to read for a social studies or history class.

  5.00 out of 5

  LainaBourgeois

• I've read Diary of a Young Girl many times since I first discovered it in 7th grade. This time, I purchased a copy of the Definitive Edition. The "old" edition became a good friend through the years. This edition has new entries that Otto Frank chose to delete from publication. This version gives the reader a deeper look at the complexities of Anne Frank and life in the secret annex.

  5.00 out of 5

  wearylibrarian

• The definitive edition's prologue states that the original edition of this diary was reduced in size to fit with a series of diaries being published by the Dutch following WW2. Envisioning an entire series of such records, why was Anne Frank's diary the standout example that became so internationally well-known?First there is Anne's tender age, which is likely younger than most other diarists of the time. She lacked the self-conscious restraint an adult might have shown, willing to write with earnest feeling about every aspect of her life, and the diary is filled with entries true to the spirit of a young teenager. She rarely let signficant time pass between entries, a second point in the diary's favour. She also had the great good fortune to begin writing her entries at exactly the correct time, not just in history but in her own personal story. There is just enough time to record a few entries prior to her hiding, in order to glimpse the life that could have been and contrast that against what follows. Anne introduces herself to her diary in the course of her opening entries as though it were a proper memoir, laying out her personal history to date. The Annex in which her family hides is a remarkable setting to read about, well planned and executed. The quality of the writing itself is a significant factor in the diary's popularity, as it captures fine details, incorporates well chosen metaphors and offers insightful character studies. Lastly, there is the diary's "spirit", conveying Anne's irrepressible optimism and the conviction that not only must everything come out right in the end, but that the world is ultimately benevolent in spite of everything she and her family are put through. Taken together, these remarkable factors may have been the impetus for accusations of this diary being fictional, ghost-written, etc. Those rumours were put to rest following Otto Frank's death, when the diary manuscript's veracity was confirmed beyond doubt. There once was a young teenage girl who felt these feelings, recorded these thoughts and lived this experience. The fact that she was so young, with bright dreams of her future and full of such talent and hope, and yet did not survive the Holocaust, serves to compound the emotional power of the work. Emma Thompson's words linger: Anne's lost future is our future, and the dreams she had remain our dreams to fulfill.This being the only edition I've read, I can't compare it with the diary's earlier, shorter edition to judge what value has been added. In the course of my reading I had two wonderful supplemental texts which I recommend: "Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary", offering photographs and background on Anne, her family and the secret annex, as well as summarizing world events that affected her; and "Tales from the Secret Annex", a collection of the fiction she wrote alongside the diary and sometimes mentioned.

  5.00 out of 5

  Cecrow

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