Girl in the Blue Coat, Monica Hesse
Historical fiction/Mystery
Hanneke is a teenager living in Amsterdam in the middle of World War II. She spends her days riding her bike around the city, delivering black market goods. She spends her nights in her family’s apartment waiting out the citywide curfew and trying not to think about her boyfriend, Bas, who died trying to protect his country from the Nazi invasion.
One day while she’s out making deliveries, one of her clients offers her an unusual – and highly dangerous – job. Since Hanneke is so good at finding impossible items, Mrs. Janssen wants her help finding a missing person – a 15-year-old Jewish girl named Mirjam who had been hiding in Mrs. Janssen’s closet until she disappeared without a trace. Hanneke reluctantly agrees, with the hope that rescuing this girl might help her overcome her grief over Bas’s death.
As Hanneke searches for Mirjam, she joins forces with Bas’s older brother and his friends, who are involved in something much more dangerous than the black market. But even as Hanneke risks her life for her new friends, she’ll have to come to terms with the fact that no sacrifice can bring Bas back.