In the book, Prince Ombra, the author tries to portray an evil in a society based on what happens in real life. This evil, though coming from a supernatural being in book, could really happen in a smaller form to people. The evil in the story is of how people change as the result of a crisis. One example of this in real life is when my mother’s father passed away. Her sister, my aunt, became a rebel all of a sudden. Whether it was her father’s death or something elses, she began to become rebellious against her mother. This was very hard for everyone in my mother’s family as her mother had to raise four kids on her own while taking on two jobs. My grandmother was unable to do anything about her daughter, and as a result everyone suffered. This is the kind of evil that I believe the author of Prince Ombra was trying to portray; one of the changing of a person during a difficult time.

Something in common in both Anne Frank and Prince Ombra is that they both have something to do with Hitler. Hitler in Prince Ombra was the evil supernatural being taken form in a human body. In Prince Ombra it is explained how all evil comes from the same place. Hitler was just the evil taken human form. In Anne Frank, Hitler’s evil takes shape as Anne Frank, her family and friends are all persecuted by Hitler and his Nazis. Prince Ombra tried to explain in a fictional way where the evil of Hitler came from and Anne Frank showed how the evil of Hitler was used to hurt people. It struck me as strange that I had picked two books that both dealt with Hitler’s evil without knowing what Prince Ombra was about. Then again, Hitler’s evil was so great that it is probably the subject of many books.

Though Asher Lev didn’t deal with Hitler, it did deal with a similar idea of persecuting Jews. Stalin persecuted the Jews of Russia. I think that this kind of shows how the evil isn’t always in the same place all of the time. In fact it is almost always in a different place each time. There is always going to be evil thoughts and evil deeds in the world. However, the people that are the brunt of this evil change. It is just a coincidence that in all three of the books, Jews are the ones being persecuted.

The big difference between Anne Frank and the other two books, Prince Ombra and Asher Lev, is that Anne Frank is a real diary while the other two books are fictional. It is because of this that the reader can understand the evil presented as more real because the reader knows that Anne Frank is a real life experience written down during World War II. That is why when Anne Frank writes about the horrors that Hitler caused, it is easier for the reader to become more emotional due to the fact that they know that such an evil really existed.

In each of the books that I read, there was the common theme of evil, and it was always focused against the minorities. It saddens me to know this evil and to understand that it will always be there. Hopefully one day we will only live in peace and harmony and that the evil will only be written about in books, but I know that will never happen as there will always be evil in this world.