My Family for the War
Raised Protestant, ten-year-old Ziskla is a hereditary Jew living in Germany in 1938. With Nazi persecution intensifying, her family is able get her on a Kindertransport to Britain. Ziskla can’t believe her mother has sent her away, and feels guilty that her best friend, Bekka, did not get chosen to go as well. In London, she moves in with the Shepards, an Orthodox Jewish family. Parents Amanda and Matthew and teenage Gary are wonderful to Ziskla, now Frances, but this proves a challenge, too: She feels conflicted about religion as she learns more about Judaism, and guilty about loving Amanda, who is so warm, unlike her own mother. The tension of feeling torn between two families—one of whose fate is unknown for much of the story—is beautifully developed in Anne C. Voorhoeve’s arresting novel that spans the years of the war. The story is grounded in characters and relationships, but also in details of time, place, and feeling. Sometimes funny, often deeply moving, one memorable scene after another describes Frances’s life as a refugee on the home front in Britain as she wrestles with questions of family, religion, and identity, and the capacity of humans to be so cruel, and also love so deeply. ©2012 Cooperative Children's Book Center
CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 13 and older
Age Range:
Grades 6-8 (Ages 11-13)
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Format:
Novel
Subjects:
20th Century
British and British Americans
Empathy and Compassion
Faith, Spirituality and Religion
Families
Germans and German Americans
Guilt and Remorse
Historical Fiction
Holocaust
Identity
Jewish People
Refugees
Separation
World History
World War II
Diversity subject:
Jewish
Publisher:
Dial
Publish Year: 2012
Pages: 402
ISBN: 9780803733602
CCBC Location: Fiction, Voorhoeve