Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Good-bye Marianne: The Graphic Novel
Illustrator: Kathryn E. Shoemaker
Historical Fiction Graphic Novel
For ages 8 to 12
Tundra Books, 2008 ISBN: 088776830X
Marianne and the other Jews living in Berlin have already lost a great deal. Marianne’s father is in hiding, and the hateful signs saying “Aryans only” and “Jews not wanted here” hang all over the city. Now Marianne is losing even more – she is not allowed to go to school. Though she is not sad to miss a math test, Marianne will miss her friends. What will she do all day if she does not have a school to?
What happens turns out to be more drastic than Marianne could ever have imagined. With no warning at all, Marianne’s mother tells her that there is a place on the Kindertransporte, and that she wants Marianne to take that place. Marianne and many other mostly Jewish children are going to be sent out of Germany to the relative safety of England. There they will be taken in by local families, until the children can be reunited with their own families – if they have one. Marianne dreads being separated from her mother and father, but she accepts that this is just another horrible event which must be borne, somehow.
In this very moving and beautifully written graphic novel, readers will discover what it was like to be a Jewish child in Nazi Germany. They will come to appreciate how terrifying it was to live in such a place at such a dark time, and to understand how miserable it was for families to be broken apart the way they were.
