By Sara Pennypacker
In Nazi-occupied France, a boy with a coward's reputation risks everything on a dangerous nighttime run to help a young mother keep her baby.
Lucas DuBois was found abandoned in the forest as a baby and raised at an abbey school, and he's spent his thirteen years living down a reputation for cowardice. It's 1944, the Nazis occupy his French village, and his grocery-delivery job takes him inside a Lebensborn, a maternity home where babies judged Aryan enough are taken from their young mothers and handed to Nazi families. When Lucas befriends Claire, a woman desperate to keep her own child, his courage finally has somewhere to go: a rash, dangerous flight through the dark along a five-kilometer horse track called the Lions' Run.
Pennypacker and Jon Klassen made Pax together, and this has the same combination: spare, beautiful writing and a story that trusts a child reader with real feeling. It shines a light on a piece of history most children have never heard of, the Lebensborn program, through one boy's very personal act of courage, so the enormity of the war stays human-sized and gripping. It's for a strong reader ready for a serious, suspenseful story that doesn't hand out easy comfort.