The Storyteller

“To me, it seemed they were following an abridged version of Judaism, so who were they to tell me how and what to believe? I said this to my parents when I was lobbying not to have a bat mitzvah. My father got very quiet. The reason it’s important to believe in something, he said, is because you can.”

Sage’s complex relationship with religion begins at a young age and will follow her throughout the novel. She feels guilty for rejecting a religion that her extended family was persecuted and killed for practicing. Although she remains an atheist throughout the novel, her relationship to Judaism will evolve as she learns more about her family’s history in the Holocaust and grows closer to Leo Stein, a practicing Jew.

“Even the most beautiful things can be toxic. Monkshood, lily of the valley—they’re both in the Monet garden you like so much at the top of the Holy Stairs, but I wouldn’t go near them if I weren’t wearing gloves.”

This quote foreshadows Sage’s eventual method of poisoning Josef with monkshood taken from the Monet garden. Mary’s warning that beautiful things can be toxic hints to the reader that appearances can’t always be trusted, foreshadowing the reveal that kindly old Josef is a former Nazi.

“In the picture, I see a man, much younger than Josef—with the same widow’s peak, the same hooked nose, a ghosting of his features. He is dressed in the uniform of an SS guard, and he is smiling.”

This moment flips the heartwarming friendship between Sage and Josef on its head and sets the novel's primary plot in motion. In an instant, everything readers took for granted about Josef’s character is shaken and conventional ideas of good and bad are disrupted. Sage will spend the entirety of the novel trying to understand how the smiling Nazi could be the same man she befriended at grief group, before the final reveal that they are not the same person.