The Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers) by Katherine Locke
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When sixteen-year-old Ellie Baum accidentally time-travels via red balloon to 1988 East Berlin, she’s caught up in a conspiracy of history and magic. She meets members of an underground guild in East Berlin who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the Wall—but even to the balloon makers, Ellie’s time travel is a mystery. When it becomes clear that someone is using dark magic to change history, Ellie must risk everything—including her only way home—to stop the process.
From Heidi Rabinowitz
The Girl with the Red Balloon, a magical time travel, historical fiction, kind-of-sort-of Holocaust book that won a Sydney Taylor Honor in the Teen Readers Category for 2018, is now featured on The Book of Life Podcast. I met the author, Katherine Locke, at the Association of Jewish Libraries conference in Boston, where we snuck into a side room to talk – please excuse the faint hubbub coming from outside. We discussed not only Katherine’s book, but also her article on Medium.com, “Thinking about Jewish Children’s Literature in a Time of anti-Semitism.”
Check out the podcast interview here: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-girl-with-red-balloon.html