Read Once free in the Little Reads app.
Morris Gleitzman's Once is a story for 11 year olds about a boy who has been told just enough to misunderstand absolutely everything.
Felix is Jewish. He lives in a mountain orphanage and the year is 1942. He has been there three years and eight months, and he isn't an orphan at all. His mum and dad are Jewish booksellers and they left him with the nuns until things got easier.
Then a whole carrot turns up in his soup.
Nobody in that place has ever had a whole carrot. Not the kids, not even the nuns, and they get bigger helpings because being holy uses up energy. Felix works out what it means immediately. It's a sign. Mum and Dad's troubles are over and they are coming to take him home.
So he sets off to find them, straight out into Nazi-occupied Poland.
What makes the book what it is, is the way Felix explains things. He turns everything into a story, because stories are what his parents gave him.
Men in suits with armbands arrive and light a bonfire in the orphanage courtyard. Felix sees what they are putting on it and decides they must be professional librarians, called in because Mother Minka was complaining the library needed a tidy-up. They're only burning the leftovers.
You know precisely who they are. Felix doesn't. That gap is the entire book, and it is agonising in the best possible way.
He is also very funny. He prays to God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Pope and Adolf Hitler in one breath, covering every option he has been given.
This is a Holocaust story and it doesn't pretend to be anything else. Felix's own account stays hopeful and innocent while the reader watches what he's walking into. Nothing in the opening is graphic. Nothing in it is comforting either. If your reader hasn't met this history yet, they will have questions afterwards, probably that same evening. This is one to read near them rather than hand over and leave.
For a reader who can hold all that, Felix is marvellous company. He's kind, he's a hopeless judge of what is actually going on, and he is doing his absolute best with what he knows.
One practical note for a parent choosing the order. This is where Felix begins, so start here.
If your reader wants to know what happens to him after the last page, the next book, Then, takes up his story with barely a breath in between.
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