What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper
This novel has drawings scattered throughout, which really add to the book. Each section covers a different time period, with the book starting in April 1945 as the Bergen Belsen concentration camp is liberated. The speaker is a sixteen-year-old girl named Gerta Rausch. This camp was not her first camp, but she has survived. We see how she and other gradually begin to realize their situation, and start on the road to their future.
The next section jumps back to 1935 and covers several years, from Gerta and her father in Koln where he was a musician, through their move to Wurzburg, Gerta's growing into her teens, and suddenly being wrenched away from all that to the camps, along with her father. We see how music has been at the center of Gerta's life, and how it is music that has played a large role in her survival within the camps.
The book also follows Gerta into the future as she finds a new start in another country.
Good for teens, this novel gets inside the head of a young person who must come to terms with many difficult changes in her life, and learn many things to discover who she feels she is as she moves into adulthood.
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