By Monica Hesse
Hanneke, a teenage girl trying to make ends meet, delivers
black market goods to paying customers in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. Hanneke has a special knack for finding sought
after items. Her boyfriend was killed on the Dutch front
lines when the Germans invaded, so Hanneke likes to think of her illegal acts
as a small rebellion against the Nazis.
When delivering to a regular customer, Anneke is asked for
help locating something special. Mrs.
Janssen is desperately looking for a highly dangerous person: a Jewish teenager
Mrs. Janssen had been hiding in a secret room of her house. The girl had
vanished without a trace in a city that was not kind to girls like her. The
race against the clock for Hanneke to solve the mystery of the girl in the blue
coat is one fraught with danger, intrigue, and grief.
Along her search, she encounters members of the resistance
and is forced to look outside her narrow, grief stricken views of what is happening
to her country and accept that a much larger evil is at hand. The dark secret that is Jewish treatment
under Nazi occupation in World War 2 is revealed to her and she must decide
whether to face this new truth, or pretend it does not exist. Weaving into the historic tales of the onderduikers, the hidden Jews of
Holland, this mystery novel has a great blend of history and intrigue laced
throughout.
Read with a box of tissues if you’re the type that cries
over books, maybe even if you’re not! At times heart wrenching, this book is
wonderfully written and insightful. I loved the characters’ growth throughout
the novel, and appreciated the historical events recounted in this story.
A good read alike would be Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.
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