The Sydney Taylor Shmooze

Uprising by Jennifer A. Nielsen Scholastic Press (imprint of Scholastic, Inc), 2024 Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Judy Ehrenstein Buy at Bookshop.org Based on the life of Lidia Durr Zakrzewski, this is a fictionalized account of Poland under the Nazi occupation, as experienced by Lidia and her well-to-do family in Warsaw. They are not Jewish but seem to have good relationships with the Jews around them, including employing Doda as a housekeeper. Lidia is a headstrong, confident pre-teen as the book begins, talented at the piano, but the object of her mother's constant criticism, unlike her older brother, Ryszard and the memory of a long dead sister, Krystina. With Germany's invasion, life changes suddenly. Papa joins the army and is not seen again. With the months and years of war and its deprivations, Lidia grows to be an independent and resourceful young woman, determined to get an education, help others, and join the Resistance. When Doda and her mother, Bubbe are forced ...

Lines of Courage by Jennifer A. Nielsen Scholastic Press, 2022 Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Meira Drazin Buy at Bookshop.org Lines of Courage is a sweeping, ambitious middle grade novel about World War I. The book follows young adolescents Felix from Austro-Hungary, Elsa from Germany, Juliette from France, Kara from Britain, and Dmitri from Russia. Their lives criss-cross and overlap in "deus ex machina" kinds of ways—including through a war medal, a knitted hat, a stitched red star, and homing pigeons—and the reader is shown how even people whose countries are at war with each other do not need to be enemies. The novel begins with Felix Baum witnessing the assassination of crown prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. As the war starts and his father, a sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army, goes off to fight, Felix's hometown of Lemberg becomes occupied by the Russians (who have joined Bosnia against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire). As the Russians be...

 Rescue by Jennifer A. Nielsen Scholastic  Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Stacy Nockowitz Buy at Bookshop.org Jennifer Nielsen’s newest middle grade historical fiction, Rescue , returns to the World War II time period of her Sydney Taylor Notable Book, Resistance , but with France as its setting. In Rescue , as in her other books of historical fiction, Nielsen gives us a courageous and resourceful heroine, Meg Kenyon, who lives in a rural area of Occupied France with her mother and grandmother. Meg’s father has gone to fight/spy against the Nazis, and the family has not heard from him in the two years that he has been away. When Meg finds an injured British captain in the barn behind her grandmother’s house, he offers her a way to bring her father home: If Meg leads a family of three out of France and into Spain, they’ve promised that her father will go free. All Meg has to help her on the hazardous journey is an encoded note from her father and a backpack of supplies from t...