The Girl With the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

Teen Science Fiction/Historical Fiction. Ellie, our heroine, time travels back to East Berlin a year before the Wall comes down. She travels there via a red magic balloon and finds out her grandfather was saved by a similar balloon from the concentration camps during World War II. I enjoyed the connections that happened as the story progressed and overall it had a good plot. The biggest problem I had was not a major part of the story line. The three teenagers, although somewhat abandoned in their worlds, seem to have no problem drinking and sleeping around. This is only vaguely touched on, but it still bothered me that passing around a vodka bottle was treated as normal and expected considering the situations they were experiencing. None of the adults in the story seemed to see this as a problem. The historical fiction accounts of the Jews in the Polish ghettos and the mystery surrounding how some escaped were thought provoking, but the under-aged drinking and promiscuity tainted the story for me.

Recommend: No