An brilliant adventure set in time of high drama and tension that is oft ignored in novels for this middle-grade age group!
BERLIN 1961
Anja and Monika live opposite each other. They play together every day, with Otto the cat.
One night they wake up to bangs and shouts. Soldiers are building a huge barbed wire fence between them. A terrible forever wall that gets longer and higher until it divides the whole city.
On the East side, Monika is scared – neighbours are becoming spies and there are secret police everywhere.
It’s Anja who spots that Otto has found a way across. If he can visit Monika, then perhaps she can too.
But Anja gets trapped and there’s no safe way back . . .
This brilliant new story from Dan Smith (another master of the skill of mixing real life history and dramatic narratives for this age group) shows the impact of living on different sides of the Berlin Wall on the families divided by it. Skilfully mixing diaries, newspaper reports, and sinister security reports from the Stasi, it brilliantly portrays the sense of surveillance and distrust that must have been a part of everyday life for the characters in the story, and conveys it through the story of Anja and Monika and the effect of the separation on their friendship.
An exciting and thrilling read, I loved this just as much as Dan's other stories (Nisha's War in particular) , and really enjoyed the setting and placement in the sixties and Cold War era.
Read an extract at the Chicken House page for the book and order your own copy!
My thanks to Dan (@dansmithauthor) , Chicken House (www.chickenhousebooks.com ) and Laura (@LauraSmythePR) for having me on the blogtour and the copy of the book for review.
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Review by Rich Simpson (@richreadalot) June 2023
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