Monday, October 11, 2010

Caudill 2010- Yellow Star

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy is another Holocaust story based on real people among this year's Caudill nominees. Jennifer Roy listened to her Aunt Sylvia's (aka Syvia) stories of surviving the Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. She decided to write the story from the point of view of her aunt who was one of only 12 children to survive and four years old when her journey began. Told in free verse, this fast paced historical fiction manages to balance the tension, fear and uncertainty of those horrible times by telling the story through Syvia's youthful hope and optimism. The Holocaust is never an easy story to tell and Syvia's is another part you may not have heard a lot about. Be sure to read the introduction and the appendix because they both extend the true history of the story in ways you will appreciate.