Boyne delivers a seemingly redundant adult sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas...Boyne creates vivid characters, but a certain thematic obviousness dilutes the dramatic effect. Fans of the first book may enjoy revisiting the material as adults, but this doesn't quite land on its own." - Publishers Weekly If the point is that this could happen to anyone, it is very obliquely made. There are serious objections to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. A child like Bruno would know what Nazism is, and would be schooled to hate Jews. A child like Shmuel would not be at liberty to walk the fence, and his anger is so muted it is nonexistent. He is not yet dead, and already he is silenced. You can’t prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel.”—John Irving, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The World According to Garp

Gretel Fernsby will prove to be one of the most complicated characters in recent times. We'll meet her at the age of ninety-one living in the upscale section of Mayfair in London. She's been a widow for some time after the passing of her husband Edgar. But her son, Caden, wishes for his mother to sell her flat. After all, he's on his fourth marriage and could use the cash. Gretel refuses to even consider selling. During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it – though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment.

I still think ‘Boy/Pyjamas’ is a good story, as long as one reads it as exactly that, a story of fiction. Mother and I escaped Germany in early 1946, only a few months after the war ended, travelling by train from what was left of Berlin to what was left of Paris. Fifteen years old and knowing little of life, I was still coming to terms with the fact that the Axis had been defeated. Father had spoken with such confidence of the genetic superiority of our race and of the Führer’s incomparable skills as a military strategist that victory had always seemed assured. And yet, somehow, we had lost.”I believe everyone has their own line in the sand, the point beyond which they either won’t go or would be uncomfortable going. As we become more experienced and learn more, we may shift that line from ‘won’t’ to ‘uncomfortable’, depending on pressure and circumstances.

Gold, Tanya (2022-09-15). "All the Broken Places by John Boyne review: misjudged thriller sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 2023-01-09. That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of Striped Pyjamas, which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the nine-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pyjamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. If every man is guilty of all the good he did not do, as Voltaire suggested, then I have spent a lifetime convincing myself that I am innocent of all the bad. It has been a convenient way to endure decades of self-imposed exile from the past, to see myself as a victim of historical amnesia, acquitted from complicity, and exonerated from blame. Among my most popular books are The Heart’s Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky and My Brother’s Name is Jessica. From the author of the multi-million-copy classic, and The Heart's Invisible Furies. A devastating, beautiful story about a woman who must confront the sins of her past and a present in which it is never too late for bravery.Manov, Ann (2022-10-26). "The moral corruption of Holocaust fiction". The New Statesman . Retrieved 2023-01-09. Sequel to the hugely successful The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, All The Broken Places is a moving story about grief, guilt and complicity. Needless to say, that with John Boyne at the helm, we’re treated to a storyline full of insight, from the ugliness of life through to the purity of love. Don’t miss this one! For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him. Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.” Forbes, Malcom (2022-12-02). "Review: 'All the Broken Places,' by John Boyne". Star Tribune . Retrieved 2023-01-09.

As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.” Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1946, German born Gretel, and her mother escaped Poland for Paris, after a monumental event took place in their personal lives. Physically they may have fled their past, but psychologically, the shame and accompanying fear meant they would never really find peace. We see Gretel hesitate at the line she drew in her youth, her determination to leave the past in the past, and her continued justification for making that decision. For how much is she responsible and for what should she feel guilty?

In his author’s note, John Boyne states that “All the Broken Places” “is a novel about guilt, complicity, and grief, a book that sets out to examine how culpable a young person might be, given the historical events unfolding around her, and whether such a person can ever cleanse themselves of the crimes committed by the people she loved.” He also stated that “I have less interest in the monsters than I do in the people who knew what the monsters were doing and deliberately looked away.” One of John Boyne’s most popular and intensely moving stories was The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and he has taken the step after many years to write the sequel, All the Broken Places. It must have weighed on his mind if he could maintain the legacy of such an admired and deeply profound story. Holocaust stories, especially fiction, are responsible for paying respect to the emotionality of characters and delicately navigating a tale that never reduces the impact of the horrendous crimes committed. With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialization, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study. At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with All the Broken Places alluding to criticisms of Striped Pyjamas.