Review: A Ladder to the Sky

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the story of Maurice Swift. Maurice has ambition and wants to become a writer in a big way. That is his only focus. He has one tiny problem; he doesn't have talent. Well, he can put stories together and do rewrites, he has that ability. But a real writer would be able to think up his own plots.

Maurice is very attractive and when working in a hotel in Berlin he manages to become friendly with a famous novelist, Erich Ackerman. Our Maurice is able to get Erich talking about his past and to confide things that he did during the war. Maurice grabs on to this realizing that he has found his perfect first novel.

We visit Maurice in his different stages of life and a leopard never changes his spots.