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Book Summary

Reviewed by Monica Wyatt

Thirteen-year old Hannah detests attending her family Seder. All the talk about remembering the Holocaust bores her until she finds herself transported to a Polish shtetl in 1942. There, she joins the inhabitants as they're taken to a concentration camp. This time-travel story, an excellent introduction to the Holocaust, has great power for young readers.

Is It Any Good?

4

Teens sometimes casually dismiss the past as irrelevant and uninteresting. In THE DEVIL'S ARITHMETIC, Jane Yolen uses that attitude, and an intriguing time-travel plot device, to place a modern teenager in a traumatic historical event, helping to bring history to life and directly connecting past events to the character's life.

Through Hannah, readers find themselves in a grim four-day journey by boxcar to the concentration camp. In all that time Hannah gets one cup of dirty water to drink; she's packed in so tightly she can't move; with no toilet facilities, people simply soil themselves, adding to the intolerable odors; and a child dies in her mother's arms and one of Hannah's new friends dies too. And that's just the beginning of the horror. Even readers who already know about the Holocaust get caught up in the suspense of the book, and those who need an introduction will certainly get one here.

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