(2017), on the mysteries behind a small town arsonist. (2016), a young adult novel set in German-occupied Amsterdam during WWII that won the 2017 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Young Adult Novel, and An Author's Note provides background on Crystal City and wartime incarceration in general while also noting the historical liberties taken in the novel.Īuthor Hesse is a feature writer from the Chapters are told from either Haruko or Margot's perspectives some include italicized remarks that seem to come from an older Haruko or Margot looking back. But as tensions close in on each of their families, each is forced to make a difficult choice about the nature of their friendship. They dream of leaving together and having their own apartment in San Antonio, the closest major city. Margot and Haruko soon begin meeting after school in an ice house to do homework and talk, sharing secrets and resentments they can't talk to anyone else about. While most German American children attend a school intended to prepare them for Germany, her relatively liberal parents allow her to attend the Federal School, where she is the only German American in her age group among Japanese American students. Her father had been taken in for attending a pro-Nazi meeting. Once in Crystal City, she forms an odd friendship with sixteen-year-old Margot Krukow, whose family had been Iowa farmers. The family had lived in Denver prior to the war, where her father worked at a nice hotel. Seventeen year old Haruko Tanaka arrives at Crystal City in August 1944 with her younger sister and mother to join her interned father. Young adult novel by Monica Hesse that tells a complex story of a friendship between two teenage girls, one Japanese American and one German American, in the PoV:Told from perspective of two teenager girls įacility:Crystal City - Crystal City, Texas Theme:Coming of age Growing up – pain or pleasure Loss of innocence InterestLevel:Grades 7-8 Grades 9-12 Adult

The war outside monica hesse