Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse - ADVISABLE

Hesse, Monica Girl in the Blue Coat, 301 pages.  Little Brown and Company, APRIL 2016.  $18.  Language: PG (6 swears, 0 ‘f’); Mature Content: G; Violence: PG (non-graphic deaths, but this is World War II).

Hanneke has been surviving the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam by working for the black market as a runner.  Then one of her customers convinces Hanneke to help look for a young Jewish girl who was hiding in her home but has now disappeared.  When Hanneke contacts the brother of her former (read dead) boyfriend, she gets involved in the much bigger and desperate picture of the war.  Now she is involved in much more personal ways.

I loved reading a book about Amsterdam (one of my favorite cities ever) and I am kicking myself for not asking a lot more questions about life during World War II to the people I knew when I lived in the Netherlands myself.  Hesse elaborates on events that I knew about but never studied and adds a different dimension to Amsterdam during WWII besides Anne Frank.

MS, HS – ADVISABLE.  Cindy, Library Teacher

1 comment:

Ms. Yingling said...

I read a ton of Holocaust books when I was in middle school but have grown slightly weary of them. Still, our 8th grade has a unit on it, and I always need more books. Definitely looking at this one now!