Berlin, 1932: In many ways thirteen-year-old Gabriella Schramm lives a charmed, carefree life. She loves her parents and her sister, Ulla. She loves her new literature teacher. She loves her family’s summer lake house, next door to Albert Einstein’s. And most of all, Gaby loves books.
But soon she begins losing all these thing, one by one, as Hitler unstoppably climbs to power. People Gaby thought she could trust turn out to be Nazis. Many of her friends are fleeing, or, worse, being taken away. And there’s something troubling about Ulla’s boyfriend that Gaby can’t quite figure out. As always, she turns to her books for comfort – but even those are disappearing.
Newbery Honor winner and master of historical fiction Kathryn Lasky once again brings the past to life with this searing portrait of a nation on the brink of war, and a girl whose life is about to change.
Was This Book Worth My Time?
YES! YES! YES!
I spend a 6 weeks in my classroom teaching a Holocaust unit and was anxious to see if this book portrayed the Holocaust in an interesting way. Let’s face it, when a teacher says we will be studying historical fiction many students sigh. It’s hard to get kids to want to learn about history (kudos to you history teachers that made it interesting).
This book is FANTASTIC. Somehow, Lasky weaves the rise of Hitler’s power into a story about a curious, independent girl, Gaby, and her family’s fight to be independent thinkers.
I learned more about the Holocaust than I have in doing research to present in my lessons. Lasky nonchalantly throws in information in a way that feels easy and simple to understand. I thought about why it was that I felt this way and came to the realization that it was because I was Gaby. It was easy due to the style of Lasky’s writing to become Gaby and live her life. I felt her emotions and lived her fear.
What Bothered Me?
When I get to this part of my blog, I always think really hard about something, anything, that might throw a reader off the novel. If I say that “nothing” bothered me, it’s because I literally could not find one thing that might throw someone off.
When I thought about this book, the only thing that “threw” me was the fact that there were many paragraphs devoted to talk between Gaby’s father and Albert Einstein. As you can imagine, any talk with Einstein would include in-depth discussions about science, and the talks with Gaby’s father were no exception. I am a fan of learning (you would be hard-pressed to find a teacher who wasn’t); however, I am neither a science nor a math lover and ,therefore, spent most of those paragraphs feeling a little bored.
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