Milkweed Book
This is the true story of Jews and Gypsies in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. But it is also the story of a street orphan who survives on quick thinking schemes to find food: who believes in bread, mothers and angels. A tragic but beautiful account through the eyes of the innocent.
This is a remarkable book – a great story that is funny and moving, but at the same time, quite harrowing. A book which must now constitute the most remarkable of children’s Holocaust fiction. A tremendously powerful and poignant novel. Jerry Spinelli takes us to a devastating period of history but tells a poetic tale of heartbreak and survival … A reader cannot fail to be moved with this story.
Milkweed is fresh and vital. The writing is vivid and as funny as it is uncompromising in its depiction of the horrors of life … Sentimentality is successfully avoided and the whole rings of authentic experience while also bearing the marks of a fine piece of storytelling.