ANGEL GIRL

This true story is both inspiring and heart-wrenching. Beginning with a brief note on the Holocaust, it immediately leaps to the separation of 11-year-old Herman from his mother at the trains heading to the concentration camps. Herman describes life in the camp in a poetic, lonely voice: the fear, the unabated labor, starvation and death. One day a girl appears on the other side of the fence and gives Herman a precious apple. The girl comes every day thereafter with one apple for Herman, and begins to think of her as his angel and his hope. Years later he goes to New York, and by chance or fate Herman and his angel are reunited. With off-kilter angles and faces dominated by soulful eyes, Amit’s gloriously expressive paintings are as arresting as they are haunting. This is a thorny topic for the picture-book set to absorb, but because of the luminous ending, this represents an exceptional entrée for discussions about history and, most importantly, profound kindness in the face of cruelty. (afterword) (Picture book. 7-10)