Rescue

Jennifer A Nielsen's Rescue is a wartime story for 11 year olds about a girl carrying secret messages for the French resistance.

What happens

Meg Kenyon has not seen her father for 657 days. She counts them. He left the morning after the Germans crossed the border, and she was too angry to wave him off, which she has regretted every day since.

Now she lives on her grandmother's farm in the Perche with her mother, selling potatoes on the black market to people who can't get food any other way.

That's what her mother thinks she's doing, anyway.

What Meg is actually doing is following German officers around town and leaving snowballs on a wall at the edge of the forest. An odd number means a message is waiting. Seven snowballs means run.

Papa was the one who taught her codes. He left her a jar of folded papers, one to solve each week until he came home, and there's one left in it. She's been saving it, because solving it would feel like giving up on him.

Then she comes home and the barn door is ajar. There's something on the snowy path outside it. Drops of blood, and they look fresh.

The reading experience is brisk and close. Meg tells you everything herself, and each chapter opens with one of the rules she's been taught. Trust is earned, not given. Question everything. Your reader gets to work on the codes alongside her, which is genuinely fun, and Meg is a careful, watchful girl rather than a reckless one. (She gives a hungry boy three potatoes and still refuses to tell him her name.)

It doesn't soften the war. There's hunger, propaganda in every newsreel, an officer with death in his eyes, and a mother who goes out on an errand and doesn't come back when she should. Nobody is killed on the page in the opening stretch, but the fear is real and constant, and Meg knows exactly what a Nazi camp is.

So this one suits a reader who can sit with tension rather than one who wants adventure with the worry taken out.

What to read next

If the codes are the bit that grabs them, try The Bletchley Riddle next. Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin send a brother and sister into the summer of 1940 too, one cracking ciphers inside Bletchley Park and one running her own secret search for their missing mother.