![]() Dirk’s quick-thinking inventiveness and indulgence of Anna’s chirpy exhortations to pray keep the tale grounded in the children’s perspectives, and a light hand with gruesome details marks this for a middle-grade audience. Their ordeals are interspersed with chapters focusing on Els’ suffering at the hands of the Gestapo. Even after arriving safely at Tante Cora’s home, the children must go out to obtain desperately needed food and are captured and imprisoned in a munitions factory. Chapter-ending cliffhangers punctuate the children’s treacherous journey, which readers can trace on a frontmatter map. Dirk takes Anna and flees, knowing the Gestapo may imprison them or worse in their effort to smoke out Papa, a leader in the Dutch Resistance. ![]() It is almost as bad: A neighbor tells him the Gestapo has picked up his older sister, Els, and will come for Dirk next. Thirteen-year-old Dirk, alone with his little sister, Anna, is afraid it is the Gestapo. ![]() ![]() Set in the Netherlands, 1944, this wartime drama opens with a “Bam! Bam! Bam!” on a farmhouse door. ![]()
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