In the movie, JoJo is an innocent child. We see how the Nazi party corrupted and molded people contrasted with JoJo’s “education” and redemption. The book is entirely written in first-person by Johannes, so we get passing glimpses of the Nazi corruption of the individual, but very few. Johannes’s actions and perspectives are shaped by his isolation and his family (his father, his mother, and his grandmother), to darkly disturbing ends, rather than childhood naïveté and a corrupting force. While JoJo’s story is one of childhood and redemption, Johannes’s story is one of stunted man-child levels of maturity with no checks-and-balances in his life, leading to selfish madness.

Fitting with the tone of the book, Elsa is nothing more than an object on the written page. She has no agency other than to be the anchor Johannes’s story is chained to. Elsa on screen is every bit a piece of the narrative structure as JoJo. She serves as the redeemer to balance the influence of Nazi propaganda on JoJo. I find this very fascinating as the book is written by a woman, yet Christine Luenens seems to completely eradicate any humanity or purpose from most of her female characters (save one). If the point was solely to show Johannes’s corrupt nature, she nailed it.

As I closed the back cover, I made this observation: The movie made me want to read the book to get more from the story. The book made me want to watch the movie to cleanse my pallet. It is well written, it just wasn’t what I was hoping for. 2020 has been bleak, and where the movie brought rays of hope, the book crushed me like most of this year. It just wasn’t the right book for this time.