If I Should Die Before I Wake (Paperback)

by Han Nolan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Few novels can match this effort for its stupefying lack of taste. Teenager Hilary, who has never recovered from the long-ago death of her father and from her Bible-thumping mother's temporary abandonment of her, lies in a coma, the victim of her own adventures with her neo-Nazi pals. Suddenly she "slips" into another life--that of a Jewish girl in Poland at the beginning of the Nazi occupation. It turns out that she is sharing the memories of her hospital roommate, whose telepathic communications eventually bring about Hilary's salvation. Gratuitously lurid subplots involve teenage American neo-Nazi depredations and the torture of Hilary's young Jewish neighbor; the Holocaust flashbacks feature a psychic grandmother. Passages about Nazi ghettos and concentration camps seem cobbled together from survivors' memoirs (noticeably, Kitty Hart's several autobiographies and Fania Fenelon's Playing for Time ), while the overall conceit owes a major debt to Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic. Any hope that the author will redeem this misbegotten first novel is quickly quashed by her unrelievedly airless prose. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal
Grade 7-12-Hilary Burke, a young Neo-Nazi, is in a coma after a motorcycle accident. Ironically, she has been taken to a Jewish hospital and shares a room with elderly Chana, an Auschwitz survivor. Instrumental in the kidnapping of her 13-year-old Jewish neighbor, Hilary hates all Jews and believes one caused her father's death. Through Chana's memories, the girl is transported back to World War II, experiencing for herself the horrors suffered by Polish Jews just trying to survive, first in the Lodz ghetto, then in the concentration camp. While the subject matter is certainly compelling, this first novel is not as powerful as Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic (Viking, 1988) or as chilling as Jay Bennett's Skinhead (Watts, 1991). Nolan does a better job of portraying Chana than Hilary or her Bible-quoting mother, but Mrs. Burke's dysfunctional personality and Hilary's problems with her are clear. Interspersed are Biblical passages that are sometimes appropriate to the text, but often unnecessary and distracting. The ending is predictable and soppy: Chana dies leaving an album full of family photos to Hilary. Stick to the numerous, excellent-quality, existing examples of Holocaust literature.
Jo-Anne Weinberg, Greenburgh Public Library, NY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Paperbacks (April 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0152380418
• ISBN-13: 978-0152380410
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (83 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #347,132 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing book on what we all need to remember, May 19, 2000

By	Melissa (MO, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If I Should Die Before I Wake (Hardcover)

Han Nolan has written an amazing book on something that some people don't want to believe ever happened:the Holocaust.

16 year-old Hilary Burke-a Neo-Nazi- is injured terribly in a motorcycle accident. Her boyfriend, Brad, also a Neo-Nazi getting off with only a few scratches and bruises.

As she slips in and out of consciousness, she falls into the life of Chana, a jewish girl who is wrapped up in the times of the Holocaust. Her terrifying life as a young Jew helps her realize what she is doing(hanging Jews in trees and beating them up) is absolutely wrong.

When Hilary is telling the chapter, all she can see is a 'Grandmaw', the actual Chana. Chana helps her realize that what she is seeing is her life as a child. At the end of the book, Chana's only living relative, her sister Nadzia, comes to tell Hilary something that hurts them all...especially after what Hilary(Chana) has just been through in her dreams.

To find out more, I won't mess up this review and tell you what happens next. You have to read the book...

Recommended for: 13+

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My New Favorite Book, February 2, 2001

By	Brandy (Madison,Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

"If I Should Die Before I Wake" is now by far my favorite book. It is a sentimental story about a 16-year-old neo-nazi named Hilary and how her life crosses paths with the life of a young Jewish girl living in Europe during World War I named Chana. When Hilary gets in a car accident with her boyfriend Brad she finds herself in a coma at a Jewish hospital. As she struggles for her life she passes over from the views of her life to Chana's. As Chana, Hilary sees the many horrible and emotionally terrorizing things that the Nazis did to the Jews. Many of Chana's family members and friends are killed. This book gives a very descriptive, mind altering explanation of the concentration camps and the brutal deaths of the Jews. After seeing this Hilary realizes how wrong the Nazis were and changes her views about Jews. This book was very passionate and I recommend it for anyone who likes a good tearjerker because this book will definetly make you cry. Han Nolan did an excellent job of portraying the realities of the Holocaust.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars VERY REALISTIC and a great insight into the minds of both Neo-Nazi's and Jews (at the time of WWII), June 17, 2006

By	E. Savage (SanDiego, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: If I Should Die Before I Wake (Paperback)

It is the story of a young teenage girl named Hillary who was speeding on a motorcycle with her boyfriend, Brad, when they "crashed and burned," leaving Brad unharmed, but Hillary inches from death. She was rushed to a Jewish hospital, where she is slipping back and forth through consciousness, unable to contact anyone around her for the time she is in bed.
When she is "unconscious," she is a girl named Chana. Chana is a Jewish girl, living in the years a little before and during the war. While she is Chana, it is only Gestapo members on the streets, beating down the Jews and their pride. Eventually, they are all sent to a Jewish ghetto, where daily life consisted of a body under a 2-story building window, filth, disease, hard manual labor, families of eight to ten living in one room apartments, and more death.
Then later, when the SS lines them all up yet again, she is almost deported, but when not, she escapes in the dead of night. For a time, she is able to pose as a Polish citizen, when someone she used to know rats her out as she gets on a train to be part of a Polish worker round-up, which had meant freedom.
She is then imprisoned until she is sentenced to "hard work" for life, and is sent to Auschwitz. The real Chana survives the war.
During all of this, Hillary sees what the Jews had to go through. She started out in the beginning completely hateful. She is part of a plan that locked up a Jewish boy in one of her schools lockers without food or water for a few days, and her Neo-Nazi group, the Warriors, are about to participate in a huge march.
Her mother also comes into the story, and stays by her bedside as the story progresses, but Hillary's mother, we find out, is another reason she became a Neo-Nazi, as they have had no relationship during her childhood (her dad was her "lifeline"). Then We see Hillary starting to talk (to herself as others stand around her), she reveals that she's had an empty chalky feeling ever since she was five, until Brad came into her life. It was he who influenced her to be recruited into the Warriors. Brad later comes to visit, with constant "Heil Hitler's" and informs her that they are going to torch the hospital, then leaves saying: "You're a hero, Hil. Remember that. You're dying for the cause, White Power! ... Heil Hitler babe. See you in hell."
The fire turns out to fail, and the real Chana herself has just died of cancer as an old woman in the bed next to Hillary, but in was Chana who was able to supernaturally share her past with Hillary. Hillary is now changed, as this has been a very humbling experience.