The Search and A Family Secret Graphic Novels

A Family Secret

A Family Secret provides a graphic novel overview of WWII from a "safe" Dutch girl's perspective as she relates the tale of her Jewish friend who suffered through the terror of the Holocaust. Characters in the book represent a wide diversity in respect to decency – from the innocent to the heroic resistance fighters, from the passive bystanders to the brutal Nazis. Firmly rooted in history and delivering accurate facts along a precise timeline, A Family Secret does a remarkable job of communicating some of the most perplexing and disturbing events in Dutch history. The story and characters from A Family Secret are intertwined and expanded upon in The Search.

The Search

In this graphic novel about the Holocaust, a Jewish grandmother recounts to her grandson how she escaped from the Nazis and survived. With her grandson's help, she plunges into a search to discover what happened to the rest of her family during their last months at Auschwitz. The Search is a compilation of many stories of Jewish families who experienced the horror of the Holocaust. While the illustrations are not explicit, the narration is fairly specific about the horrors the characters experience.

Please note: There is an instance of language on page 25 of The Search. While it will not be new to many middle-school students, parents with young readers may want to hit it with a touch of white-out.

From the Publisher:
The Search - Esther remembers her own experience of the Holocaust as a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, and recounts to her grandson Daniel and his friend Jeroen how she escaped from the Nazis and survived by going into hiding in the countryside. Her parents were not so lucky. Esther knows they were sent to a concentration camp and died there, and with Daniel's help she embarks on a search to discover what happened to them during the last months of their lives. After tracking down an old friend who now lives in Israel, Esther finally learns the shocking story of how her parents met their fates at Auschwitz.

A Family Secret - While searching his grandmother's attic for likely items to sell at a yard sale, Jeroen finds a photo album that brings back hard memories for his grandmother, Helena. Helena tells Jeroen for the first time about her experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War, and mourns the loss of her Jewish best friend, Esther. Helena believes that her own father, a policeman and Nazi sympathizer, delivered Esther to the Nazis and that she died in a concentration camp. But after hearing her story, Jeroen makes a discovery and Helena realizes that her father kept an important secret from her.

Experienced parents know that the amount of reading their child does will have a direct and positive impact on his reading fluency and vocabulary development. That is why graphic novels - which we used to refer to as comic books - though once relegated to the category of lowbrow reading, are now experiencing a surge in popularity.

You may think that the comic book medium is primarily for mainstream American children who are peppered by snack-size visual and audio bombardment. If you desire that your children slow down and feast on the written word, then you may cringe at the idea of a graphic novel version of Moby Dick. But before you issue a home-wide ban on these books, consider the following.

If you have a reluctant or beginning reader, your first concern should be for fluidity and competency. You will find that the graphic novel's illustrations draw your child in even as the vocabulary becomes more complex. Then, because the graphics are so attention-grabbing, children often find themselves reading for pleasure.

If your reluctant reader is an older child, your main concern may be making sure that he is culturally savvy. With graphic novels, vocabulary is introduced via contextual clues, making great literature accessible to more children. The interesting pictures and snappy dialogue, with little-to-no narration to bog the reader down, will encourage independent reading and learning. As the child's competence and confidence grow, so will his joy of literacy.

Even if your older child is a competent reader, he will enjoy taking a break from the verbally intense books characteristic of higher-level learning to enjoy a more visual form of storytelling. A 2006 study found that the amount of reading children did for fun decreased from the time they were eight through the teen years. Graphic books can re-engage them in the delights of reading for leisure as well as for learning.

There are children who may never read for pleasure; God just might have wired them differently. But most children, from the reluctant, faltering reader to the brilliant but easily bored adolescent, will find graphic novels intriguing.

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A Family Secret
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 64
Publisher: Square Fish, under Macmillan Publishing
Copyright: 2009
Author: Eric Heuvel
English Translation By: Lorraine T. Miller
Production: Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, in cooperation with the Resistance Museum of Friesland
ISBN: 9780374422653
Publisher's Age Recommendation: 10-14
Faith-Based: No

Awards and Endorsements:
Kirkus Best Book of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year

The Search
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 64
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), under Macmillan Publishing
Authors: Eric Heuvel, Ruud van der Rol, and Lies Schippers
English Translation By: Lorraine T. Miller
Production: Anne Frank House, in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam
ISBN: 9780374464554
Copyright: 2009
Publisher's Recommended Age Range: 10-14
Faith-Based: No

Awards and Endorsements:
Texas Maverick Graphic Novels List
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year

review by Bible Momma

”Although these are fictional stories, they are based on meticulous historical research on World War II and the Holocaust, and present information related by eyewitness accounts.”

Read the Review