Thanks for stopping by, Kate, with your fair and well-reasoned comments. It's friendly interactions with fans like you that make this job worthwhile.

The child is in fact the narrator of the book, but it is actually something of an experimental novel which Hollywood seems to have white-washed into a movie of the week. If they added enough syrup to the voice-over, it's quite possible you'll never be able to shake that in reading the book, which is too bad. You wrote, "If the movie had felt a bit more like a fairy tale, its contrivances and emotional coercions might have been forgivable," and I think that is largely what the book actually succeeds at doing. Oskar is not the most believable character in literature when taken at face value, but the book is far more interesting than face value.

The movie is actually so bad that I have a lot of trouble believing that the book could possibly be any good, especially if the voice-over narration is taken directly from the novel…But I'll take your word for it.