During World War II a young German girl, who has been indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth, travels to occupied Amsterdam to rejoin her parents then comes to realize the truth about the war. New introduction by the author's son, John Tepper Marlin. "So, you're falsifying papers?" said Janna. "You belong to the Dutch Resistance." She looked at him curiously. The boy shrugged his shoulders. "You could call it that. I'm just helping the van Arkels rescue innocent people from certain death. They need these identification papers and food cards to keep alive. If you betray me, all these people will either starve or be forced to give themselves up to be sent to the gas chambers of a concentration camp." "Gas chambers?" Janna looked at the boy with horror. "You mean ... they are killed?" The book looked sternly at her. "Do you think," he said, "that Germany is sending Jews to a nice vacation spa, or to pretty villages with geraniums in the windows? That's what they told us at first, though in Holland we never believed it." This book is based on a true story, and even though it deals with some hard issues brought about by the German occupation of Amsterdam, it provides an opportunity to discuss World War II from a unique perspective.

Borrowed Lives is a novel. It is an enactment of issues of literary philosophy and criticism, including the question of whether there can be originality, coherence, and authenticity in life and art. It deepens William Blake’s point — Make your own myth or else be enslaved by another man’s — by asking whether one’s own myth isn’t also another man’s myth and by portraying the terrible consequences of taking one’s own myth literally.

Poets from both sides of the Pacific join together for the first time in this 50th anniversary anthology.

Winner, Jane Addams Children's Book Award A young girl navigates family and middle school dramas amid the prejudices and paranoia of the Cold War era in this “excellent example of historical fiction for middle grade readers” (School Library Journal) World War II is over, but the threat of communism and the Cold War loom over the United States. In Detroit, Michigan, twelve-year-old Marjorie Campbell struggles with the ups and downs of family life, dealing with her veteran father’s unpredictable outbursts, keeping her mother’s stash of banned library books a secret, and getting along with her new older “brother”—the teenager her family took in after his veteran father’s death. When a new girl from Germany transfers to Marjorie’s class, Marjorie finds herself torn between befriending Inga and pleasing her best friend, Bernadette, by writing in a slam book that spreads rumors about Inga. Marjorie seems to be confronting enemies everywhere—at school, at the library, in her neighborhood, and even in the news. In all this turmoil, Marjorie tries to find her own voice and figure out what is right and who the real enemies actually are. Includes an author’s note and bibliography.

An exotic, heartbreaking memoir that should finally earn Paula Fox, a distinguished novelist and children's book writer, the audience she has for decades deserved Paula Fox has long been acclaimed as one of America's most brilliant fiction writers. Borrowed Finery, her first book in nearly a decade, is an astonishing memoir of her highly unusual beginnings. Born in the twenties to nomadic, bohemian parents, Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. Her parents, however, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part betrayer." Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. How, Fox wonder, is this woman "enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly"? Never sharing more than a few moments with his daughter, Fox's father allows her to be shunted from New York City, where she lives with her passive Spanish grandmother, to Cuba, where she roams freely on a relative's sugar-cane plantation, to California, where she finds herself cast upon Hollywood's grubby margins. The thread binding these wanderings is the "borrowed finery" of the title-a few pieces of clothing, almost always lent by kind-hearted strangers, that offer Fox a rare glimpse of permanency. Vivid and poetic, Borrowed Finery is an unforgettable book which will swell the legions of Paula Fox's devoted admiriers.