THE WAR OUTSIDE by Monica Hesse

One of my favorite books in recent years was The Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse. I read it for the Mock Awards (I was on the Printz committee), and I very much pushed to have that as a contender. I still to this day recommend it constantly, and I have put it on several recommended lists that I have compiled. It’s a WWII story about a girl living in Amsterdam selling things on the black market. One of her clients hires her to find a Jewish girl that she had been hiding who had vanished without a trace. Historical fiction, thriller, tearjerker – this book had it all. So I was super pumped to find out that Monica Hesse was coming out with another YA historical fiction book – The War Outside. I’ve been waiting patiently for its September 25th release date, but as luck would have it – I caught Kate Nafz, our Children’s Librarian reading an ARC of it. She gave it to me the other day, and I breezed through this very well written book.

The War Outside also takes place during WWII, but here in the United States. Haruko’s father has been sent away from Colorado to an internment camp in Texas, and his family decides to follow. There Haruko finds Margot, a german prisoner in the Crystal City camp. They form a very intense, brief, more or less secret (since the Japanese and German prisoners don’t really socialize) relationship. They talk about things they don’t with other people, their questions of what brought them to the camp, fears about their families, and their dreams for the future. There is always an end date to their time there, but that date comes a little more quickly than they expect when 2 young girls accidentally drown in a swimming pool. This sets off a heart pounding chain of events that leads to one of the girls’ families being deported. Monica Hesse again has chosen a viewpoint not often seen in WWII novels, life of a POW in the United States internment camps. She also knows how to pull at all your heart strings. The ending I thought didn’t resolve things neatly (which I always find frustrating), but is true to life – people’s stories didn’t end when they left those camps. Good job, Monica Hesse, another excellent book.