A review by tabithar
The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

4.0

I heard about this book from "The Big Read". Imagine if a story your grandpa always told about WWII that you thought was unbelievable turned real for you. This story tries to do a few things. 1) It attempts to show the confusion and terror of a concentration camp that had a single unexplained survivor. 2) It also tries to give a new perspective on the tensions and desperate need in East Berlin before the wall fell. 3) It IMO may oversimplify present tensions. This may be opened up more in a future book. 4) It uses a vague mathy magic as a machanism to pull the reader into what is largely historical fiction with the politics of sci-fi.

I liked it. It was a little challenging/very slow to start and I enjoy multi POV books. It took a minute to realize what was going on between chapters though. This would be well suited in an audio version.