Number the Stars, Lois Lowry

I know I said on Goodreads I started reading this book a long time ago, but in all honesty, I only read the introduction by the author when my daughter finished Sword of the Summer and that one was due back at the library first so I quickly switched. So I updated that in Goodreads too, started today, finished today.

This book fits into the 2016 Challenge as: read a book you can finish in a day

I'm not sure if I'll read any others in a single day! I LOVED this perspective and historically accurate depiction of how the Danish reacted to the Nazi occupation. Though the characters are fictitious, nearly all of the occurrences are accurate to history. I know that some feel that WWII is overdone and I'll be the first to admit I know a lot more about WWII than I do about WWI, but I also know that part of that is because of have Jewish ancestry. But I like how in this story, it is from the perspective of a 10 year old girl. My older daughter is almost 11 now. She has been reading all about Malala Yousafzai. She got a book about her from a book order and then in the next book order, she got the Youth Edition of her autobiography. I have been steering her towards literature that teaches about bravery and doing the right thing, and how even in the face of danger, doing what's right is ALWAYS the best choice.

In the afterward, Lois Lowry includes this quote from a boy who was part of the Resistence to help the nearly 7,000 Jewish population of Denmark be smuggled across the sea to Sweden. This quote is from a letter he wrote to his family the night before he was executed after being caught. "...and I want you all to remember-that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create and ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with the pleasure feel he is a part of-something he can work and fight for. Surely that gift-the gift of a world of human decency-is the one that all countries hunger for still. I hope that this story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible."

5 stars from me