Set in Autumn of 1961, Dan Smith’s latest children’s novel opens right before the Berlin Wall cuts off East Berlin from West Berlin, splintering families, friends and lives along with it. Told from the point of view of two children experiencing the event as it unfolds –The Wall Between Us shows readers how the everyday lives of everyday people were affected by the seismic divide.
12 ¾-yr-old Anya and 12 ¼-yr-old Monika are cousins and best friends. They live opposite each other and share their lives together (and even share a cat!) – until the Berlin wall is built right down the middle of their street.
It starts out as a coil of barbed wire and Anya and the other children are even a bit excited to see soldiers and officers and tanks on the streets. But as the days go by and bricks pile higher, the two girls soon find an unsurmountable wall has sprung up between them, and they can’t even wave to each other from their bedroom windows anymore. Anya and Monika struggle to understand and accept what is happening around them, especially in an ever-growing atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and news of arrests and disappearances. The haunting cover by Steve Wells does a brilliant job of showing the girls’ feelings and predicament.
The author’s uses character voice to great effect and the novel, using journal entries, letters, and messages as a medium. The story is also interspersed with newspaper clippings which make the history underpinning the story engaging and accessible for young readers. But this is no dry history lesson! Quite the opposite.
The journals and letters that tell us the story actually come from a police file, a file that tells us these items were taken from Anya following her arrest on 7th October 1961. There is a delicious tension in knowing this from the outset. And as the date of Anya’s arrest draws closer, and she takes increasing risks to get to Monika, we are torn between curiosity and concern for this intrepid character. How will it all end? How will she ever get back to her family?
Full of adventure and peril, The Wall Between Us cleverly packages history into a thrilling page turner perfectly pitched for age 9+ A fantastic novel for schools!
