Book Recs

These are a few books I've read that I think teens would enjoy if they are interested in historical fiction.

Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry. This book is amazing. The first half is about a German-American boy in love with a non-classified Jewish girl in 1939. The second half is about the man the boy has become, an intelligence agent hunting down the man who destroyed his life. It's well-written, humorous, romantic and dramatic. McCarry was a spy during the Cold War and tosses in just enough detail about the way operatives and operations work to pad the story without making it too technical. The last line is a killer.

Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor is a murder mystery set during the Irish famine and it occurs partly on the eponymous vessel but mainly in Ireland and England. From almost the beginning the victim and murderer are identified and you get to know them and the people who know them. But it turns out not to be as straightforward as the author lays out. The famine is a character itself and its existence drives much of the characters to action (or inaction). The book is organized as a book-within-a-book by a journalist who is himself intimately connected to the story and may not be as disinterested as he tries to be.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne is a modern-day fable/allegory about a naïve German boy, son of a death-camp guard father. He befriends a captive Jewish boy. The story is told entirely from the first boy's p.o.v. Beginning to end, he never comes close to understanding what is happening around him, instead fitting the tragedy into a schema appropriate to his own life. Boyne uses the boy's misunderstanding of certain words to underscore the intent of the true words. (This only works in English, I imagine this loses something in translation.) For example, he misunderstands his father's boss's name as "The Fury", and no amount of correction will dissuade him of this, especially after he witnesses the man's dinner manners. Often, the naivety of both children was incredibly frustrating, which the author does address in an interview included in this edition of the book. It does not have a happy ending, but it does close with a feeling that a lesson has been learned by the one character who needed to learn it most.