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Annexed was a bold undertaking. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is a pretty sacred Holocaust memoir. To explore Peter’s point of view in a novel constitutes a huge literary risk. On some levels, it paid off. But, as you’ll notice throughout this review, this book raised a lot of questions for me.

The novel introduces Liese, Peter’s fictional first girlfriend and a personification of his sexual awakening. He longs for her while trapped in the annex, and the narrative does not shy away from some of his more “vivid” dreams of her. Was she necessary? It’s hard to say. In all likelihood, Peter would have had to grapple with teenage hormones while confined in close quarters with so many other people. Is it fair to put words in his mouth and thoughts in his head, to take creative license with a real person’s private thoughts, though? I’ll leave that one to the biographical literary critics. The fictional Liese was effective in her role here, driving home just how much Peter was missing while cooped up in the annex.

It was the interactions between Peter and Anne that felt a bit off to me. Anne came off as rather daft when seen through his eyes. I never got that impression of her from the diary, but I also read it twice when I was a teenager, when I was around her age. We know from the diaries that Anne saw the beauty in many things, but Peter’s point of view made her appear annoyingly optimistic. In this regard, I felt that the book sometimes missed the mark when it came to characterizing Anne. She was a teenager, yes, but was she really that spoiled, careless, flirtatious, annoyingly optimistic, etc.? Would she and Peter really have been that frank with one another about sex? I feel like I need to reread the diary now to make a fair evaluation of this book.

In some scenes, Peter asks Anne not to write about something in her diary. This feels like a cop-out, a way to introduce fictional conversations and events into a true story chronicled quite closely in a daily diary.

The most poignant part of the book was, for the most part, pure fiction. In Part II, which doesn’t begin until close to the end, we experience the concentration camp through Peter’s eyes. Dogar tells us in the epilogue that she has constructed this section from secondhand accounts and pure imagination. Again, this proves effective. Part II does a good job (arguably, too good a job) of depicting the concentration camp experience. Dogar also provides a nice reading list at the back of the book for further study (I’ve already put the Five Chimneys memoir on hold at the library).

A side note: I wasn’t a huge fan of the chapter headings in this book. They were rather dry (e.g., “Peter feels hope,” “Peter wants Anne, Anne wants to write,” “Anne and Peter are in his bedroom,” etc.). Because they are so straightforward (essentially one-line chapter summaries), they don’t add much to the narrative.

I’m the rare reader who actually enjoys present-tense narratives, and I understood why it was necessary here. Because the novel merges Peter’s present-tense life in the annex with his past-tense reminiscences while in the concentration camp, uniformity of verb tense isn’t really possible. My only stylistic complaint was that the writing felt a bit staccato. Lots of sentence fragments. One-sentence paragraphs. A disproportionate number of simple sentences. This was effective in times of suspense, but sometimes made it difficult to connect with Peter during more contemplative moments in the story.

Overall, I give this book points for bravery. It does read somewhat like fan fiction at points (an inevitable danger in any creative nonfiction/historical fiction novel) and sometimes stumbles in the execution. But it is also a nice attempt to lend voice to a figure who, across the decades, has remained secondary to the story. And there can never be too many novels to remind us of what people are capable of doing to one another.

(Disclaimer: I received the galley proofs of this title from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for review.)