People don’t warn you how mad you are when someone you love die. First she managed to perfectly capture the essence of grief : indeed it’s rarely devoid of anger – blind, unfair anger we almost never see pictured in books – and that explains partly why I could connect so strongly. Reading Please Ignore Vera Dietz felt like that, and this story reached to old and hidden parts of me I didn’t even remembered. I was wrong, because now it’s too late, and that feeling? All frustration and guilt and anger and love. Truth is, I always thought that I’d had the time to sit down and really talk someday. I knew that my father’s childhood wasn’t all sunshines and rainbows but he never liked to talk about it, and I didn’t press him. In the sixties, difference was not a good way to go. People in nowhere town, nowhere country France never stopped reminding him that he didn’t belong : part Algerian, part Parisian (like a different nationality for them really), he was the kid parents warned their children against, because god forbid any kind of open-mindedness. Every day he would see the family children eat it at breakfast, but never once did he break the rule. When he was a child in his foster home, my father wasn’t allowed to eat butter. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to?Įdgy and gripping, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an unforgettable novel: smart, funny, dramatic, and always surprising. So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone-the kids at school, his family, even the police. And over the years she’s kept a lot of his secrets. Vera’s spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn.

Vera dietz