By Sara Pennypacker
Illustrated by Jon Klassen
Balzer + Bray / Macmillan, 2026
267 pages
978-1-250-392-81-7
Ages 8-13
In Nazi-occupied Lamorlay, France, in 1944, gentle, sensitive Lucas works as a delivery boy and lives at the abbey where he was raised. When a group of his peers cruelly tries to drown a mother cat and her kittens, Lucas (white) fails to intervene but manages to rescue several of the kittens from the water afterward. Sheltering them in an abandoned stable, Lucas is surprised to encounter Alice, a bold, brave British girl who is using the stable to hide her beloved mare, Bia, from the Germans. Alice knows that Bia has great potential as a racehorse, and she has a plan to get Bia out of France to train with Kentucky horse trainers in the U.S. As Lucas and Alice slowly warm to one another, Lucas also befriends Claire, a young woman at the nearby Lebensborn, a regular stop on his delivery route. The Lebensborn is a well-resourced home for French women who are pregnant with the babies of German soldiers. The infants will be separated from their mothers and adopted by German families. As Lucas witnesses the Nazis’ cruelty against his Jewish neighbors and contemplates Claire’s infant son’s fate—to be separated from his birth parents, as Lucas himself was at birth—he summons his courage and joins the Resistance, using his delivery route to pass secret messages. When Lucas makes a stunning, impulsive decision—one that at first seems more reckless than brave—there’s no going back; the book races toward its powerful, heart-pounding, heroic ending. ©2026 Cooperative Children’s Book Center