"Rose Blanche" By: Roberto Innocenti

I thought the book Rose Blanche was really interesting. It's about a young girl living in Germany during WWII. She doesn't fully understand what is going on around her, but she notices some changes in her town. She notices all of the soldiers and their tanks. She also notices a boy get thrown back into a truck one day while walking home. Curious, she decides to follow the truck, and she finds a concentration camp just outside her town. The people at the camp ask her for the bread she is holding. She hands it over and notices how skinny the people behind the fence are. Rose continues to return to the camp day after day, and each day she brings as much bread as she can. Time passes, and then one day people are fleeing her town, and she notices that there are other soldiers in town with different uniforms. Unaware of the environment around her Rose goes to the camp, and is accidentally shot.
This is a very sad book. It is loaded with war and death. But the war is seen through a child's eyes, and I think that is a very interesting and important aspect of this book. Because it is told through the eyes of a child the reader only knows as much as the child does about the war, which in Rose's case is limited. I thought this book was very interesting; especially after reading the inside cover. The title of this book is Rose Blanche, which is also the name of the little girl. The author chose this name because Rose Blanche was a group of young German citizens protesting the war. They chose to face the facts rather than ignore what was going on, and because of this they were killed. The little girl's character relates directly to the meaning of her name, which I thought was a really neat way to indirectly incorporate some history into the book. Although I thought this book was really interesting I was also somewhat disappointed with the perspective this book was told from. In my Children's Literature class we discussed how there are very few books that tell the story through the victim's eyes. I think that there are so many books about WWII that are about German people helping the Jews, and unfortunately very few about the Jew's struggle.
I can understand why this book is considered controversial because it deals with some very deep topics. But I also think that if presented in the right way this book can give students some insight into WWII. I wouldn't have this book in the classroom library for students to read whenever they wanted to, but I could see reading it aloud to the class if we were discussing WWII.