STORIES OF HOPE: FINDING INSPIRATION IN EVERDAY LIVES by Heather Morris

 The Tattooist of Auschswitz and Cilka's Journey have had  powerful impacts on everyone I know who has read them and all the millions of others out there around the world. The Tattooist in particular has run riot through shop tills, book clubs, families and friends, long library waiting lists. It has resonated so strongly because it is true, told straight from the horse's mouth, hours of interviews, talking, meeting, carefully peeling back the layers of Lale and Gita's lives. And with a love story at the centre of it, the book was guaranteed to be a winner. Cilka followed much the same formula but for me it did lack that authenticity and edge of the Tattooist, I suspect because there was no real personal contact with Cilka, much of the story based on research and anecdotal evidence. Despite this, what has been so compelling about these two books is that they are essentially true, and for many many people given them an outstanding insight into the appalling things that humans do to others, and yet somehow the will to survive, to do good to others, to hope, to just get through all this horror is what is so inspiring.  

So Heather Morris writing a book about hope, how we can find inspiration in the lives of those around us, about how she came to meet Lale - on the surface an ordinary elderly man recently widowed,  how she gradually eked out his story, her research into Lale and Gita's lives, the concentration camps and the lives of those in them, and yet still seem to have the power to forgive was definitely a book I was interested in reading. 

But... oh dear. It wasn't really about all that at all. Sure, there was quite a bit about Lale, Gita, Cilka, and three Jewish sisters who also survived the camps and who are the subject of her next book. But much of this information, aside from the three sisters, is actually at the back of each of the Tattooist and  Cilka. There is some new information, but not enough to justify a whole new book. What's more, much of all this is repeated several times in this book of 178 pages, almost as if she wrote one chapter without referring at all to the other chapters. Where was the editing? But it was written during covid lockdown, so maybe there was no one around to edit?

More frustrating and irrelevant were chapters on how to talk to and with elderly people, how to listen rather than hear, and how to communicate with children so that they feel valued and heard. It seems to me that those who have read one or both of the Tattooist or  Cilka are well on the way to being emotionally intelligent without the patronising tones of someone who has successfully managed to publish her ability to tell a story. Thirdly this book becomes, with its regular repetition of the three sisters who survive the camps, a relentless publicity drive for that next book. 

I found this such a disappointing book to read. There were some sections which were very very good, insightful, and interesting. But the overall tone was one of spin, regurgitating already published material and considerable self promotion. She is much better at telling other people's stories rather than her own.