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Review: Code Name Kingfisher by Liz Kessler

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Code Name Kingfisher by Liz Kessler

Code Name Kingfisher
Liz Kessler
Aladdin Books
Published May 7, 2024

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About Code Name Kingfisher

When Liv finds a secret box from her grandmother’s childhood she uncovers an extraordinary war-time story of bravery, betrayal and daring defiance. A story that will change Liv and her family forever…
 
Holland, 1942. The world is at war and as the Nazis’ power grows, Jewish families are in terrible danger. Twelve-year-old Mila and her older sister Hannie are sent to live with a family in another city with new identities and the strict instruction not to tell anyone that they are Jewish.
 
Hannie, determined to fight back, is swept into the Dutch resistance as an undercover agent Code Name Kingfisher.  And though Mila does her best to make friends and keep out of trouble, there is danger at every turn and the sisters are soon left questioning who they can trust…

My Review

I can’t remember if I had this book on my radar for May earlier this year, but when I received a copy from the publisher, I was pretty excited about it. I love the bright colors of the cover and the way it incorporates a kingfisher bird into the image. It also shows the personality of both Mila and Hannie, the sisters at the center of the story.

The book follows four different points of view. It begins with Liv, a girl living in modern-day England who discovers the person she considered her best friend isn’t such a great friend. We also meet Mila, a Jewish girl forced into hiding by the Nazi occupation of Holland. We meet her sister Hannie through the letters she writes to her family about her work with the Dutch resistance movement. Mila’s friend Willem narrates a handful of chapters at some critical moments in the story.

As Liv struggles to deal with the shift in social connections and bullying at school, she discovers some papers in her grandmother’s attic that hint at her grandmother’s past, which she has refused to talk about to anyone. To Liv’s surprise, her grandmother begins to open up to her.

I love the sweet relationship between Liv and her grandmother and the surprising way that it unfolds. I also love the alternating viewpoints and the way Hannie’s, Mila’s, and Willem’s chapters reveal information from the past.

Code Name Kingfisher is perfect for historical fiction fans, especially those looking for more stories about World War II. The contemporary sections will appeal to those readers, too, and I think there’s enough story taking place in the present to keep contemporary readers engaged.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 8 to 12.

Representation
Mila and Hannie are Jewish. Liv is Jewish on her dad’s side of the family.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
A teenage girl has a crush on a teen boy. It’s pretty peripheral to the story.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
References to oppressive laws passed against Jews by the Nazis. References to arrests and deportations to work camps. Hannie believes her parents are probably dead. Characters experiences heightened fear when faced with Nazi soldiers, but salute and greet them as part of undercover identities.

In one scene late in the book, a boy hears a soldier shoot someone. He sees the person’s body afterward.

Drug Content
Characters, including teenagers, smoke cigarettes.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Review: The Shadow Sister by Lily Meade

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The Shadow Sister
Lily Meade
Sourcebooks Fire
Published June 27, 2023

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About The Shadow Sister

Sutton going missing is the worst thing to happen to Casey, to their family. She’s trying to help find her sister, but Casey is furious. And she can’t tell anyone about their argument before Sutton disappeared. Everyone paints a picture of Sutton’s perfection: the popular cheerleader with an entourage of friends, a doting boyfriend, and a limitless future. But Sutton manipulated everyone around her, even stole an heirloom bracelet from Casey. People don’t look for missing Black girls–or half-Black girls–without believing there is an angel to be saved.

When Sutton reappears, Casey knows she should be relieved. Except Sutton isn’t the same. She remembers nothing about while she was gone—or anything from her old life, including how she made Casey miserable. There’s something unsettling about the way she wants to spend time with Casey, the way she hums and watches her goldfish swim for hours.

What happened to Sutton? The more Casey starts uncovering her sister’s secrets, the more questions she has. Did she really know her sister? Why is no one talking about the other girls who have gone missing in their area? And what will it take to uncover the truth?

My Review

I love sister stories. I also love being part of the readership who discover a fantastic debut novel by an author who is sure to become a new favorite. It’s even better when those two things appear in the very same book.

First, let me say that the characters in this book are rich and layered. What they believe to be true isn’t always objectively true (happens to us all). I feel like writing a character who both comes across as genuine and genuinely wrong is really challenging, and Lily Meade makes it look absolutely effortless.

The rich themes of family, history, and reclaiming personal power are expertly threaded through the narrative of this book. I loved the way the characters explored family history and relationships. I also loved the elements of magical realism– again, something that I think is not easy to write in a way that feels believable and anchored in the real world. Yet it’s brilliantly done here.

I also really appreciated the author’s note and the care she takes in explaining her connection to some parts of the story. That only deepened my appreciation of the book, and I think added even more to the conversation within the text about intergenerational trauma and reclaiming power.

I’ve been super choosy about which books I’m adding to my shelves lately (my bookshelf runneth over!), but I will definitely be adding this one. I absolutely recommend this story for readers who, like me, love sister books or stories about family and the transformative power of love.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Casey and Sutton are biracial sisters. One minor character is a lesbian.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used very sparingly.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl.

Spiritual Content
Casey and Sutton’s family attends a local church that preaches, as one of the girls puts it, a “condescending prosperity gospel”.

Violent Content
Characters discover the decaying body of a murdered girl. A person admits to murdering someone and attempts to murder someone else.

Drug Content
Police suggest a recently missing girl was using drugs, even though her tests repeatedly show no drug use. An unconscious girl may have been drugged; it’s unclear.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of THE SHADOW SISTER in exchange for my honest review.

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

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Top 10 Books for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Friday, January 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that date in 1945, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated. Some of the stories listed here share the lives of some of those who were imprisoned there. Some were imprisoned at other camps. Still others fled their homes in Europe in an attempt to escape the Nazis.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is “freebie”, so I’ve chosen to share some of the books I’ve read or that are still on my reading list that feature stories based on historical events or family history. Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl in which bloggers share their top ten book choices. Here are mine for this week.

10 Books to Read for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story Retold for Young Readers by Jeremy Dronfield

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | My Review

What you need to know: The true story of two Austrian-Jewish brothers in WWII. One escapes to America. The other goes with his father into concentration camps, first Buchenwald and then Auschwitz.

Release Date: January 24, 2023

Boy From Buchenwald: The True Story of a Holocaust Survivor by Robbie Waisman with Susan McClelland

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | My Review

What you need to know: How the author and 472 other boys (including Elie Wiesel) survived imprisonment in Buchenwald and found hope when Albert Einstein and Rabbi Herschel Schacter brought them to a home for rehabilitation.

Release Date: May 11, 2021

Hedy’s Journey: The True Story of a Hungarian Girl Fleeing the Holocaust by Michelle Bisson

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | My Review

What you need to know: The story of the author’s mother and her journey through WWII Germany to escape to America.

Release Date: August 1, 2017

The Librarian of Auschwitz: The Graphic Novel by Antonio Iturbe, Salva Rubio, and Loreto Aroca

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | My Review

What you need to know: Based on the true story of a fourteen-year-old girl imprisoned in Auschwitz becomes the guardian of 8 books slipped past the guards. I enjoyed this graphic novel a lot and thought of Dita when reading another book that mentioned books in Auschwitz.

Release Date: January 3, 2023

MAUS:

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | Reviews: Book 1 . Book 2

What you need to know: A man navigates a challenging relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor, who tells the tale of his experiences.

Release Date: November 19, 1996

28 Days: A Novel of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | My Review

What you need to know: Ruthie and her family board the St. Louis to escape from Germany and the concentration camps. When they’re denied entrance to Havana, Ruthie is determined to help find a place she and her family will be safe. A novel in verse based on real historical events.

Release Date: May 1, 2021

28 Days: A Novel of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | TBR

What you need to know: When she learns of plans to murder everyone living in the Warsaw Ghetto, sixteen-year-old Mira joins the resistance, holding the Ghetto for 28 days. Based on the author’s family history.

Release Date: March 14, 2014

Letters from Cuba by Ruth Behar

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | TBR

What you need to know: After fleeing to Cuba with her father, Esther writes letters to her sister, who remains in Poland with the rest of the family. She records all her experiences as she waits, desperately hoping the rest of her family will be able to make their escape from the Nazis as well. Based on the author’s family history.

Release Date: August 25, 2020

Just a Girl: A True Story of World War II

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | TBR

What you need to know: In 1938 Italy, six-year-old Lia’s life is turned upside down by war. As danger grows, Lia and her sisters hide at a convent where she grows into a young teen, waiting for the day she can be “just a girl” again. A memoir adapted for young readers.

Release Date: January 1, 1994

The Length of a String by Elissa Brent Weissman

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads | TBR

What you need to know: Imani, an adopted girl, discovers her grandmother’s diary in her search for her birth parents. In it, she discovers the story of Anna, her great grandmother, a Jewish girl who fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg to the US where she was adopted herself.

Release Date: May 1, 2018

Have you read any books on the Holocaust or World War II?

If you have, which ones stick with you the most? Have you read any of the books on my list of ten books for International Holocaust Remembrance Day? Let me know! I would love to add more books to my reading list.

Review: The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

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The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukranian Famine
Katherine Marsh
MacMillan
Published January 17, 2023

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About The Lost Year

From the author of Nowhere Boy – called “a resistance novel for our times” by The New York Times – comes a brilliant middle-grade survival story that traces a harrowing family secret back to the Holodomor, a terrible famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.

Thirteen-year-old Matthew is miserable. His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved in his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother to ride out the pandemic, adding to his stress and isolation.

But when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor – the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.

An incredibly timely, page-turning story of family, survival, and sacrifice, inspired by Marsh’s own family history, The Lost Year is perfect for fans of Ruta Sepetys’ Between Shades of Gray and Alan Gratz’s Refugee.

My Review

Stories with alternating timelines are hit or miss for me, but Katherine Marsh is an author whose books have been on my To Be Read list for a long time. That plus the Kyiv setting and rarely explored place/time in history made this book too good to pass up.

It took me a couple chapters to feel like I found my footing in the story. Matthew, our present-day main character, is chafing at the isolation and boredom of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Because his family cares for his 100-year-old great grandmother, they stay isolated from the community.

He ends up tasked with helping his great grandmother (GG) sort through some old papers and files. Through this, he discovers a family history he’d known nothing about. Two point-of-view characters from the past, cousins Mila and Helen, reveal the story of the Holodomor, the terrible famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine.

From there, I felt like the pacing of the story picked up, and the connections between the past and present helped to fuel the forward momentum of the story. Matthew’s dad is a journalist reporting on the pandemic from France. He and Matthew discuss the (awful) power of misinformation. They talk about how people can continue to believe falsehoods even as their friends and neighbors experience tragedy.

Just as in the past, Mila at first refuses to believe that her country is experiencing a preventable famine that has already killed thousands.

Conclusion

I thought the way Matthew’s relationship with GG develops and his budding interest in history and writing were really cool elements of the story. I loved that even in that, he shared a connection with Helen, his great-great-great-aunt(??) from the 1930s.

Altogether, I felt like the past and present timeline intersected at just the right moments. It shared themes that built on each other in powerful ways. I loved the introduction to a part of history that isn’t frequently explored, and the connection to the battle against misinformation we still face today.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 8 to 12.

Representation
Helen was born in America after her father emigrated here from Ukraine as a young man. Mila and Nadiya are Ukrainian.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
None.

Spiritual Content
References to celebrating Christian Orthodox holidays. Reference to the fact that religion has been outlawed in Soviet Ukraine.

Violent Content
Someone delivers a sealed envelope containing live lice to a family in an attempt to infect them with Typhus. Boys attack another boy on the playground. An older girl fights them off. Some descriptions of starvation and death. References to a man being shot.

Drug Content
None.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of THE LOST YEAR in exchange for my honest review.

Hello, Goodbye by Kate Stollenwerck

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , ,

Hello, Goodbye
Kate Stollenwerck
SparkPress
Published August 2, 2022

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About Hello, Goodbye

Fifteen-year-old Hailey Rogers is sure her summer is ruined when her parents force her to spend a few days a week helping her grandmother, Gigi. Although she only lives across town, she never sees her grandmother and knows little about her. But Gigi is full of surprises–and family secrets. Throw in the gorgeous boy down the street, and Hailey’s ruined summer might just be the best of her life.

Then tragedy strikes, lies are uncovered, and Hailey’s life suddenly falls apart. After unearthing clues in an old letter written by her great-grandfather, she takes off on a road trip to solve the family mystery with the only person she can trust. In a forgotten Texas town, the past and the present collide–and Hailey is forced to choose what she truly values in life.

My Review

I liked a lot of things about this book– most especially the relationship between Hailey and her grandmother, Gigi. One of my favorite things is all of the layering within that relationship and the things that it brings up for Hailey in her relationships with other people like her mom and even Blake.

I struggled with Hailey’s judgments about Bree, another girl in her grade, who, admittedly, isn’t very nice to her. Hailey sums her up with some cutting remarks about her being a busty, ditzy girl. I would have liked less of the cliché reasoning there and maybe more depth? Something that wasn’t judging the girl by her appearance and making some ugly assumptions.

One thing that I thought was cool about the story is that Hailey is a runner, but she runs cross country. I don’t really know much about running, but the only other books I can think of with a runner in them are runners who run track, and I didn’t even realize cross country was a totally different thing. So it was cool to learn more about that and what her training looked like.

On the whole, I liked the exploration of family relationships and Hailey’s exploration of new relationships and independence. I think readers who like books by Kasie West should check out HELLO, GOODBYE.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 12 up.

Representation
Hailey is Jewish (this comes as a surprise to her– her family attends a Baptist church). She learns that her great-grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. The “gorgeous boy down the street” is also Jewish.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between a boy and girl. References to other characters hooking up. Reference to a girl having sent nude photos of herself to a boy, which she gets in trouble for doing.

Spiritual Content
Hailey attends a Hanukkah celebration. References to attending Baptist church.

Violent Content
A man threatens others with a gun.

Drug Content
Hailey sees other teens drinking alcohol, but she sticks with Dr. Pepper. She helps clean up a girl who has had too much to drink and is sick.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of HELLO, GOODBYE in exchange for my honest review.