Blood for Blood Author Ryan Graudin Shares Her Favorite World War II YAs

The heroine of Ryan Graudin’s supernatural alt history thriller Wolf by Wolf, concentration camp survivor Yael, was transformed through Nazi experimentation into a shape-shifter able to pose as Aryan. In a world in which the Axis Forces won the war, she used her gift to take over the life of media darling and motorcyclist Adele Wolfe, planning to use the identity to get close enough to Hitler to kill him. In follow-up Blood for Blood, out today, she’s dealing with the fallout of her plan, and grave new threats to the resistance’s mission.
Here’s Graudin to share five of her favorite historical fiction YAs, all set during World War II.
World War II. The words alone can evoke the most powerful images: London aflame, stormtroopers goose-stepping beneath swastika banners, a mushroom cloud, beaches littered with the dead, faces peering from behind barbed wire. The massive scale of the conflict, the reach of its ruin, and its narrative regarding human nature have long intrigued me. Read any number of nonfiction books on the period—Alexandra Zapruder’s Salvaged Pages, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Jan Jarboe Russell’s The Train to Crystal City, to name a few—and you’ll find humanity stretched to both extremes. Basest evil, heroic sacrifice.
Fiction based in this era holds a weight of its own, and WWII YA novels are no exception.

Girl In The Blue Coat, by Monica Hesse
I loved this book so much I blurbed it: “It’s no small feat to bring the past to life, especially a history as dark and desperate as World War II. Monica Hesse does just this with Hanneke’s story. Brace yourself, dear reader, to have your heart bruised—and possibly even broken—in the most meaningful of ways.” I wasn’t the only one. Elizabeth Wein (arguably the queen of World War II YA) also gave this book high praise! Hesse paints the Dutch resistance with sure detail. The cost of heroism is explored in a poignant manner, as Hanneke struggles to find a missing Jewish girl in occupied Amsterdam.

Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein
Since writing the previous paragraph, I’ve decided Elizabeth Wein is indeed the queen of World War II YA. Both Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire ground the reader in war-torn Europe, and Wein’s characters feel so real I expected to find photographs of them at the end of these novels. I’m so excited that there’s a prequel to Code Name Verity in the works.

Milkweed, by Jerry Spinelli
This book is on the shorter side, but no less powerful. The narrator—an unnamed boy with no idea where he came from—survives in the streets of Warsaw by stealing food. When jackboot-wearing soldiers storm the city, he doesn’t think much of it, until his friends begin disappearing. The main character is overlooked by authorities, and roams somewhat freely, giving readers both a birds-eye and a knee-high view of the Warsaw ghetto.

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
You’ve probably already read this book. You’ve probably stained its pages with your tears. You’ve probably imagined what Death the narrator looks like. But just in case you haven’t, know that you should.

Prisoner of Night and Fog and Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke, by Anne Blankman
I adore this duology. Anne Blankman tackled an ambitious task by writing from the POV of Gretchen Müller, Adolf Hitler’s fictional niece. The first book is set in 1930s Munich, so it’s technically pre–World War II, but it does an amazing job of showing Germany’s descent into the Third Reich. Gretchen’s disillusionment with “Uncle Dolf” is skillfully portrayed, and Blankman weaves mysteries based on actual historical occurrences throughout both novels, explaining where fiction and fact diverge in her author’s notes.