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Visual Language Books

Pub Date September 4, 2025

Page 210

ISBN: 978-1891328367

Price:  $10.95 trade paperback

Genre Middle Grade/ Young Adult Fiction

Two young sisters are forced to leave Nazi-occupied Vienna alone, surviving on forged papers and borrowed identities in Shapiro’s compelling novel. Anni Blum is twelve when she and her sister Rosie are sent from Nazi-occupied Vienna to England. Their father is imprisoned, their mother trapped behind closed borders. Disguised as non-Jewish travelers, the girls knit, practice English, and pray not to be discovered. England offers safety, but war is closing in. With blackouts, bombings, and suspicion around them, Anni and Rosie must use skill, bravery, and imagination to help others and survive. Will they succeed?

Shapiro draws the English setting without romance. Country life is spare, regulated, and often isolating. The thread of the “secret buttons” grows naturally from Anni’s skills and her need to matter. Sewing and knitting become more than chores, turning into means of survival that help the girls safeguard what others cannot. Resistance here is quiet and dangerous, never romanticized. Each risk feels heavy, and every success is shadowed by those who cannot be saved. The author handles faith with similar care. Ritual exists alongside doubt, anger, and refusal. Caterina Baldi’s illustrations deepen the text rather than decorating it. The full-color chapter openings and spot illustrations echo the emotional climate of the scenes—sometimes tense, sometimes quiet, often suspended between hope and dread. Lovers of meaningful YA and middle grade fiction, and librarians building strong collections, will take note. 

A steady, unsparing novel that treats displacement as a long process of loss, adjustment, and persistence—and survival as something earned, not promised.

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