Milkweed

I picked up Jerry Spinelli's Milkweed because I'd loved his book Maniac Magee when I was a teenager. Milkweed is about a young boy, who's an orphan, during WWII. The young boy doesn't exactly have a name until he joins with other orphans and one of the older boys, Uri, starts to keep an eye out for the young boy. Uri makes up a story and a name for the nameless orphan, who Uri has named Misha Pilsudski. Misha become quite good at stealing food and he learns to steal from a variety of places.

While stealing some tomatoes from a garden, Misha meets a girl his age, who lives at the house near the garden. This girl, Janina, invites Misha to her birthday party. Misha comes to the party, and he runs away with the girl's cake. In return for the cake, Misha returns later and leaves a present for her on her door stoop. Janina begin a friendship in which they leave presents or food for one another on the door stoop. After a period of this, Janina's family gets taken away with other Jews to the Warsaw Ghetto. In the meantime, the orphan boys have been sleeping whereever they can and they've been talking about how they're all Jews, gypsies or some other form of unwanted people. Eventually, the orphans get thrown into the ghetto too.

The boys figure out ways to continue to steal food within the ghetto, and finally they get desperate enough to find ways in and out of the ghetto to steal food from restaurants, homes and trashcans. Misha meets up with Janina and her family and he begins to bring their family food that he's stolen. After a while, Janina's family essentially allows him to stay with them when he wants and Janina's father begins to show that he cares about Misha through simple acts of giving Janina and Misha small presents and kind words. Of course, things aren't exactly hunky-dory in the ghetto as the food situation and the rampant murder of Jews by Nazis continues in and out of the ghetto. With this, Janina's father convinces the children that the two of them need to sneak out of the ghetto and stay out because the danger is becoming too great.

While I enjoyed the book as a whole because it reminded me of The Book Thief and it's an interesting time period, I was disappointed with the ending. I enjoyed the characters in that they were each unique and the children's perspectives were interesting in that their naivete created a compelling story.