By Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan; art by Pascal Dizin
Think: ‘Nancy Drew times Tintin’ to get a sense of this book. Set in World War Two-era New York City, spunky and imaginative tweenager Evelyn is sent by her father to spend the summer with an artistic and distractable maiden aunt in her Upper East Side apartment. The father has a new fiancee to squire around the country club set, and Evelyn just may be in the way.
As Aunt Lia has little experience or expertise in parenting, Evelyn has a great deal of free time to become bored, to mope, then to explore and get herself into trouble. Some trouble manifests in a new friendship with the working class son of the building superintendent.
As kids do, they fall into a natural conspiracy– or, it being World War Two: counter-conspiracy. Aunt Evelyn’s apartment building stands in the heart of the Germantown neighborhood of 1940′s Manhattan, thus to a ten year old girl it’s entirely plausible there are Nazi collaborators wherever they look. Perhaps this is a ‘girl who cried wolf’ situation, but perhaps not…
