The Girl in the Blue Tunic
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Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.
Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.
The Girl in the Blue Tunic
Eleven-year-old Hannah finds herself at the boarding school formerly attended by not only her deceased mother, but also her grim granny. After initial sadness she actually begins to like the place, in part due to her new, swotty, cynical, friend Lucy, and in part due to a mysterious waif-like girl, who flits in and out of Hannah's life. These visitations form the basis of a detective/ghost story, that proves our heroine has a more convoluted family history than she thought. This is a lengthy novel, but with easy-read print and it moves at a steady pace. Girl readers in late KS2 and early KS3 should warm to it. The characters are identifiably real and the setting modern, not stuffy, the same of which cannot be said about the book's disastrous cover!