(2) K-3 Translated by Annette Appel. Illustrated by Avi Ofer. A teddy bear on display in Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, narrates this picture book based on a true story from the Holocaust. The stuffed bear recalls his journey with young owner Fred from their home in Delft, Holland, to Fred's grandfather's house in Amsterdam--the family has been warned that "people would come and force us to leave"--and eventually to a stranger's home for the duration of the war. Short lines of text are surrounded by plenty of white space. The loose-lined, digital illustrations are similarly spare, though the light brown of the visibly well-loved Bear and the yellow of the stars sewn onto Jewish characters' clothing stand out. That the events are seen through innocent eyes allows for the posing of basic questions: "Why did we have to hide?" and "Why couldn't [Fred] tell anyone who he was? Did he do something bad?" A historical note at the front provides more specific information about the Holocaust, making the book useful as a discussion starter for those new to this part of history. Back matter includes an author's note and a letter from "Fred's Bear" (complete with photo), establishing both title characters as real figures.

Reviewer: Shoshana Flax | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2020

(2) YA Immediately following WWII, sixteen-year-old German girl Katja and her sister Hilde become refugees and orphans after a Soviet soldier shoots their mother, blaming her for something Katja said. Katja and Hilde find a place to stay with a farming family, telling the family that the girls' mother is alive and will come to collect them soon. As Katja contends with, and attempts to process, more violence from the Soviet army (including the rape of a secondary character), perpetrated in the name of vengeance, she is dismayed to learn about the extent of the atrocities committed by her own country during the war. For example, she (perhaps willfully, as Hilde suggests) hadn't fully grasped the danger from the Nazis in sneaking to her beloved lessons at her Jewish music teacher's home. Barker sheds light on a rarely portrayed aspect of WWII's aftermath (see also Maria Kiely's Which Way Is Home?, reviewed on page 140). Her expressive writing helps bring readers into Katja's head ("My arms shook. I held them as high as I could, as if higher meant Yes, I surrender even more"), though Katja's naiveté and continued impulsivity, including vandalizing a Soviet officer's car, might have been more believable and sympathetic in a younger character. An author's note discusses the time period and Barker's reasons for writing about it: "to ask tough questions and face unsettling truths."

Reviewer: Shoshana Flax | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2020

(2) 4-6 Translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger. Illustrated by Claire Fauvel. This graphic novel (adapted from a novel by Billet and inspired by her mother's life) follows teenage Rachel Cohen from one place to another in WWII France. By changing her name to Catherine Colin and hiding her Jewish identity, she is able to live at schools and an orphanage as well as with families throughout the ­occupied and free zones, moving whenever Nazi suspicion encroaches--and always documenting her experiences with her Rolleiflex camera. Though the story covers Rachel/Catherine's adolescence, the smoothly translated text is clear enough, and gentle enough in its explanations of the Holocaust, to be comprehensible to readers younger than the character. Themes of self-expression--Catherine's photography is a rare constant in a life overwhelmed by change--will likely resonate with a wide variety of readers. The back matter is pitched to explain this story's context to young people with little or no background knowledge about WWII or the Holocaust, though readers familiar with the basics may learn something new about this specific setting. Fauvel's borderless, color-saturated panels shift in palette by location, with red-and-black darkroom scenes standing out, particularly against the black-and-white photos produced in them.

Reviewer: Shoshana Flax | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2020

(2) YA Chee follows up her successful fantasy trilogy (The Reader and sequels) with this very different work of historical fiction, drawing on her personal family and cultural history for a story of World War II. Beginning in March 1942, three months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, fourteen young people--all but one from San Francisco's Japantown--chronicle, in interlinked stories, their lives over the course of the next three years. Their first-person, present-tense narratives depict a multiplicity of thoughts, feelings, and experiences, particularly regarding the unjust treatment of Japanese American citizens before, during, and after incarceration in internment camps. The result is slightly disorienting as characters come and go, but the overall effect is nuanced and kaleidoscopic. Gaman is a Japanese word for endurance, a dignified response to adversity; it's a characteristic most of these young adults exhibit in one form or another: "The ability to hold your pain and bitterness inside you and not let them destroy you. To make something beautiful through your anger, or with your anger, and neither erase it nor let it define you. To suffer. And to rage. And to persevere." Various graphic elements connect the story to its historical period (drawings, photographs, maps, postcards, telegrams, and newspaper articles), while the author's note grounds it in Chee's extensive research and family experience.

Reviewer: Jonathan Hunt | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2020

(2) YA The Edelweiss Pirates were groups of German youth who protested the Nazi regime through actions ranging from simple mischief and propaganda all the way up to sabotage. Because they were generally poor--and poorly organized--they, according to Gaddy, have not been properly recognized by scholars as being part of the resistance movement. This book aims to shed light on their efforts by weaving together the stories of three young people--Gertrud, Fritz, and Jean--in and around the city of Cologne from 1932 to 1945. Over those dozen-plus years, conflicts escalate, from them pulling pranks on the Hitler Youth to their prolonged interrogation at the hands of the SS. The three teens convey their unique but shared experiences, rendering a history that is at once familiar and new. Drawing on primary sources such as memoirs, interviews, government documents, and archival photographs, Gaddy unflinchingly chronicles Germany's harrowing and inexorable embrace of fascism and the brave young people who struggled against its tyranny. A final chapter leaps forward in time to discuss the current legacy of the Edelweiss Pirates. This book stands next to Hoose's The Boys Who Challenged Hitler (rev. 7/15) and Freedman's We Will Not Be Silent (rev. 5/16) as a testament to those young people who resisted the Nazis. A "Persons of Interest" list begins the book; an author's note, source notes, bibliography, and index are appended.

Reviewer: Jonathan Hunt | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2020

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Britta Teckentrup. The titular dwelling was the weekend home of Harding's great-grandparents in Germany, built by his great-grandfather nearly a century ago. Readers experience the peace and idyll of the place, inhabited by "a kind doctor and his cheery wife" and their four children; several spreads of lyrical text and serene illustrations depict a warm-hearted, carefree, sun-dappled setting. It's not long, however, before the Nazis descend, forcing the family from their home. A new family arrives, "carrying suitcases and musical instruments and love," but the war soon means that they, too, must leave rather than fight for the Nazis. The house is once again empty--then it's temporarily used as a shelter for those fleeing persecution; then it's witness to the Berlin Wall's rise and fall (and inhabited by a man who informed on his neighbors); then it falls into disrepair. And then the author arrives and fixes it up "until it shone like new...Once again the house by the lake was happy." An appended author's note very helpfully fills in the blanks of the occasionally vague main text. We learn more about the real people who moved in and out of the dwelling (it is here that we learn Harding's family was Jewish; and more about that spying inhabitant), and find out that it now serves as a "center for education and reconciliation." Teckentrup's evocative textured and layered mixed-media illustrations beautifully reflect the bucolic setting in times of both familial repose and, chillingly, unthinkable evil.

Reviewer: Elissa Gershowitz | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2020

(2) YA Hesse (Girl in the Blue Coat; The War Outside) explores the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust for one Polish Jewish eighteen-year-old. Zofia, like so many, was wrenched from her family in the concentration camps. Now liberated from Gross-Rosen, she is desperate for news of her younger brother, Abek. After months of recovery in the hospital, she goes back "home," where she is received with hostility by neighbors. Restless and unsettled, she makes her way to a displaced persons' camp in Germany, where she spends time with others who have also suffered terrible loss--and celebrates small happinesses with them. She develops feelings for a young man named Josef, whose past remains a mystery; and finally receives word of Abek, whose story is slowly revealed. Hesse's characters are believable and sympathetic. "My mind is a sieve," says Zofia, and occasional interspersed chapters, in ­italics, reveal details about her past--and about memories she may or may not have lost and/or recovered. Difficult questions about her present ("'What if my brother is dead?' Josef stares at me...'What if he is, Zofia? Do you think you could find a way to live the rest of your life?'") and future (should she join a group immigrating to Eretz Israel?) underscore the challenges of those who survived unimaginable horrors and must manage to keep living. An appended "Note on History and Research" tells more about the author's motivation and methodology.

Reviewer: Elissa Gershowitz | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2020

(2) YA This graphic novel blends historical fact and science fiction into an enthralling time-travel tale. An imagined version of debut author Hughes's teenage self is suddenly "displaced" to her late grandmother's youth during World War II, following her grandmother's family as they are forced from San Francisco first to the nearby Tanforan Assembly Center, then to Utah's Topaz Relocation Center. The skillful illustrations, with muted colors and drab backgrounds, emphasize the degradations of prison life (constant surveillance, shoddy housing) and the efforts people took to make it livable (gardens, dances). Hughes successfully employs her own family history, along with characters and story lines beyond it, to show the emotional conflicts Japanese Americans experienced. She also explores how the memories of those emotional struggles contributed to hidden generational trauma: a roommate speaks up about the rights of Japanese Americans at the prison camp yet shames Kiku's request to learn the Japanese language; the inmates experience fear over a loyalty questionnaire; they face uncertainty about restarting lives from scratch after the camps are closed. The story draws parallels to current events and encourages readers to remember and recontextualize this painful part of American history. Back matter includes an author's note, photos, glossary, and reading list. Pair with George Takei's They Called Us Enemy (rev. 9/19).

Reviewer: Megan Lambert | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2020

(2) YA Illustrated by Kenard Pak. In a poetry collection that's as much structure as style and theme, Lowry considers two events: the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. In the book's first section, poems about the author's connections to Pearl Harbor (she was born in Hawaii and lived there before the war) are interspersed with others commemorating some of the sailors who served on the USS Arizona. (The presence of an appended bibliography seems to indicate that these sailors and their experiences are not fictional, but there's no statement to that effect.) The second section, about Hiroshima, takes a similar tack, with poems inspired by Lowry's postwar childhood in Tokyo included among others devoted to the experiences of those in Japan on August 6th, 1945. "She was a young girl with / a singed uniform, and / a lifetime / of nightmares." A third section brings together the surprising link, discovered almost fifty years after the war, between the little Lois of the first section and a certain Koichi Seii introduced in the second. (We all learned about it at the 1994 Newbery-Caldecott Banquet.) There's a lot of scaffolding for such a slim book, but the poems themselves, a mix of free verse and (sometimes questionable) rhyme, are agreeably spare; the best are the triolets that close each section: "We could not be friends. Not then. Not yet. / Until the cloud dispersed and cleared, / we needed time to mend, forget. / We could not be friends. Not then. Not yet..." Modest pencil sketches throughout reflect and enhance the elegiac mood.

Reviewer: Roger Sutton | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2020

(2) YA In 1940s Vichy France, a remote mountain-plateau village known for sheltering refugees fleeing Nazi persecution houses a unique and innovative high school that draws students from all over France and beyond. Many of the students secretly work for the resistance, the maquis, which becomes much riskier after the arrival of Inspector Perdant from the national police, there to "identify evidence of illegal activities and unregistered Jews, foreigners, communists, and undesirables." Preus (Heart of a Samurai, rev. 9/10; Shadow on the Mountain, rev. 11/12) weaves the experiences of students Philippe (who smuggles refugees over the border into Switzerland), Celeste (who carries messages for the maquis), Jean-Paul (who runs a sophisticated document-forging operation), and others into a tale of danger and bravery, luck and wits, purpose and community, and even occasional humor (some pretty on-point Nazi jokes). Chapters alternate among characters, with Preus always circling back to Perdant's constant spying and dogged pursuit of arrests, which amps up the suspense (somewhat undermined, however, by how easily local farm boy Jules outwits him at every turn). An extensive epilogue informs readers about the real people upon whom the novel's characters are based; and about concentration camps, the Boy Scouts and their relationship to the maquis, and the actual high school L'Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole in the village of La Chambon. A bibliography and a pronunciation guide complete the book.

Reviewer: Martha V. Parravano | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2020

(1) 4-6 Illustrated by Akira Kusaka. Each evening Sachiko's family gathers around their table in Nagasaki, Japan. Before the Second World War, Grandmother's bowl is the centerpiece of every meal, filled with squid, eel, octopus, and udon noodles; as the war rages on, it contains only wheat balls in boiled water. Sachiko is just six years old when the atomic bomb drops. She survives the bomb, which kills three of her ­brothers--one immediately, and two later from radiation exposure. Surviving family returns to Nagasaki two years later to find their house in ashes but Grandmother's bowl unharmed--a symbol of survival. Stelson (Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor's Story, rev. 1/17) builds her debut picture book around this one element of Sachiko's story. Kusaka's illustrations effectively focus on Sachiko's family and the ways they used the bowl to create an orderly family life even in the midst of, and after, a devastating war. The ceramic bowl is the focal point of many of the uncluttered digital paintings: placed in the center of a square table, surrounded with formally arranged chopsticks and dishes. This image is repeated through the book, providing the reader with breathing space amidst dark images of war. The bomb itself is powerfully shown as a ball of fire in a series of spreads, with red light glowing through heavy black clouds. The third-person narrative's calm, direct tone and the hopeful ending make this difficult, sophisticated material manageable for older elementary-school and middle-school children. An author's note includes additional information about Japan during the war, international efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, and a brief bibliography.

Reviewer: Maeve Visser Knoth | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2020

(3) K-3 Illustrated by Marie Lafrance. Life in Munich is difficult for Anneliese's family in the months after World War II. Food shortages, streets strewn with rubble, and no library access compound grief over Papa's death for refusing to "follow orders." But when Anneliese and her little brother happen upon a "great hall" filled with children's books and a lady who reads them aloud, both children find happiness in the midst of trauma. Five pages at the end introduce Jella Lepman and her international children's book exhibit that traveled Germany after the war. The digitally colored graphite illustrations are equally adept at conveying the deprivation of post-war Germany and the power of stories to unlock hope.

Reviewer: Kitty Flynn

(2) 4-6 Translated by Laura Watkinson. In a village in the Netherlands, in the winter of 1944–45, teen Michiel van Beusekom becomes involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities--hiding and feeding a wounded British airman, smuggling two Jewish men out of the area--all the while knowing that someone in the village is betraying the cause. The pace is fast; the action is riveting; the mystery of the traitor's identity is compelling. But this is no "adventure novel": it's about war and fear and deprivation, told from personal experience (the book is based on the author's own boyhood). As such, it has a strong anti-war message: "Don't be fooled, Michiel, by the romance of war, heroism, sacrifice, excitement, adventure. War means injuries, grief, torture, imprisonment, hunger, hardship, injustice. There's nothing romantic about it." First published in 1973, this Dutch classic has been in print in Holland continuously since its publication--and deservedly so.

Reviewer: Martha V. Parravano | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2020

(1) YA In this companion novel to Code Name Verity (rev. 5/12) and its prequel The Pearl Thief (rev. 5/17), and featuring characters from both, Wein takes her turn at spinning a thriller around Germany's famous World War II code-maker/code-breaker, the Enigma machine. Louisa, fifteen and orphaned by the war, has arrived in a tiny Scottish village to work as companion to Jane, an elderly German-born ex-detainee. Louisa is impressed by her fellow tenant at the pub, Ellen, who is a volunteer driver for the local Royal Air Force base, and by Jamie Beaufort-Stuart, an RAF flight leader stationed nearby. She longs to do something to help win the war, too. In a strange turn of events, a pilot working for the German resistance leaves her a key that leads to an Enigma machine and its code settings. Between them, Louisa, Ellen, Jamie, and Jane gain access to information that changes the war for Jamie's squadron, but draws German fire to their village. Told in the three young people's voices, this cleverly plotted drama starts out slowly but escalates thrillingly. Thematically, the novel explores hidden and visible diversity through Louisa, whose mother was British and father was Jamaican; Ellen, a Traveller who censors her own voice and vocabulary in order to "pass"; and Jane, whose German origin, if widely known, would draw suspicion and ire. In sum, it is a rich work of historical fiction, wearing its period accuracy lightly (from the practical aspects of hot-water rationing to the features of military planes) and offering an unusual perspective on the war.

Reviewer: Deirdre F. Baker | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2020

(1) YA After the Greek god Hephaestus catches his wife Aphrodite, goddess of love, in a passionate affair during WWII, Aphrodite defends her actions by relating--with pathos and wit--two intertwined love stories involving four mortals swept up in WWI. Masterful storyteller Berry's tight, short, descriptive chapters span years, continents, and multiple perspectives. This poignant saga will make readers by turns laugh, cry, and swoon. Extensive historical notes on WWI appended. Bib.

Reviewer: Cynthia K. Ritter | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2019

(2) YA Bryan was a nineteen-year-old art student when he was drafted into a segregated army unit of stevedores, where he used every opportunity to sketch and record his experiences, from training to D-Day and its aftermath. Bryan's present-day text serves as a kind of voice-over to the scores of images included: original paintings and drawings, letters, journal passages, photos, maps, and army posters. The dynamic book design and lavish production choices make this a fully immersive experience. Ind.

Reviewer: Lolly Robinson | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2019

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Katie Hickey. Inspired by the British women of the Women's Timber Corp, Davis relates their journey to the forests and back again, as well as their daily lives learning to cut trees. Hickey's pastoral scenes are warm and nicely detailed. The text's constant incorporation of numbers ("Six painful blisters heal and strengthen over time. Two hands willing to work...") distracts from an otherwise interesting slice of WWII history. Historical note appended.

Reviewer: Kristy Pasquariello

(2) YA Lillia's Jewish family plans to escape the Nazi threat in Warsaw for Shanghai, but when their circus is raided they're separated from Lillia's mother. Lillia starts out naive at fifteen, and DeWoskin sensitively shows her maturing and accepting the role of sole breadwinner, taking a job dancing at a club. Rich prose details 1940s Japanese-occupied Shanghai through the eyes of a first-person narrator making sense of an unfamiliar setting. Bib.

Reviewer: Shoshana Flax | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2019

(3) 4-6 Alternator Books: They Survived series. While the sinking of the Titanic is probably familiar to young readers, the heroism of Louis Zamperini may not be. Both readable volumes contain detailed texts accompanied by both black-and-white and color photos. The chronological narratives are compelling, enhanced by boxed photo captions. Each book concludes with a "surviving deadly situations" feature with practical tips for doing just that. Reading list, websites. Glos., ind. Review covers these Alternator Books: They Survived titles: Surviving a World War II Prison Camp and Surviving A Shipwreck

Reviewer: Renée Wheeler

(3) YA This scholarly book (based primarily on Edsel's adult volume The Monuments Men) tells of the men (and one woman) who risked their lives on the front lines of WWII to preserve priceless art and buildings from destruction and looting. Despite being packed with photos and reproductions, the complex and specific subject matter, along with the dense prose, make this young-readers volume feel very adult. Bib., glos., ind.

Reviewer: Kristy Pasquariello