This book has just won the Young Quills Award 2016 (older readers) beating my Daniel and the other shortlisted books – and I’d like to congratulate Vanessa on her deserved victory. It is a very good book belonging to the WWII Holocaust genre/theme and is set in Latvia which, perhaps, has been less written about than other places. It is believable and doesn’t pull its punches. I read the book having just come across an obituary for Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and author of Night who dedicated his life to  Holocaust education and who was awarded the Nobel peace prize. So, I was maybe a little sensitised to reading yet another ‘fictional’ book on the subject as such stories need to be handled carefully. It is very well written – some students may find it quite harrowing but that goes with the territory.