Interesting premise, but in the end this wasn't really to my taste so ended up DNFing at around 15%.

Wolf Children is a story of survival and friendship in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Third Reich. Wolf Children is novel that really poses questions of how abandoned children survived in a bombed out Berlin.

DNF. Unfortunately just didn't end up being the book for. Apologies for not being able to deliver a proper review.

Wolf Children was a quick YA historical fiction following a 'rag-tag' band of orphans after Germany has fallen and the country is in ruins. Struggling to survive with only each other to rely on, danger lurks around every corner.
This was great, almost education read. From what I can remember from my history class and from reading other reviews, this was very realistic and accurate, and definitely, be used in schools. It is a book that I will bear in mind for my children.
I was brilliantly written and shows the unusual perspective of life in Germany after the war from the view of young teenagers.
Personally, it was a little slow paced for me, and I did struggle to get into it, to begin with. Written for readers 10-12+ it did feel a tad too young for me.

Otto laid out his stash carefully on the floor. There were twelve. Not bad for a night's work.The gaudy blue tins, with their American words, seemed like objects from an unimaginable world of plenty. A world where people were safe to go about their everyday lives and always had enough to eat. For a moment he was struck with a deep longing to be somewhere as safe as that in the world. To wake up in the morning and know that his life was not in danger and he would have enough to eat for the day. Where was like that? America, certainly. Canada, Australia? He had been born in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

I previously enjoyed Dowsell's book, Auslander, so was quick to request this when I saw it on Netgalley. The story follows a group of children, trying to survive and create some semblance of normalcy in Russian-occupied Berlin. Each of the characters is strong, though some get more development than others. At the centre of the book is the struggle Ulrich faces trying to reconcile his teachings in the Hitler Youth with the reality he is living in. If what he was taught is untrue, it paints his past actions in an unfavourable light...therefore the Nazi ideals must be true. Otto, his older brother, with whom he has a rather strained relationship, was never so firmly entrenched in his Nazi beliefs so has already re-evaluated the world and found Hitler's ideology lacking. Ulrich, on the other hand, clings desperately to the certainty of the 'Master Race Ascendancy' when everything else he has know has fallen apart.

This would be an interesting addition to a collection of books looking at the experiences of children on all sides during World War II.

On the night after that raid the Roths came out of their basement shelter at first light, and Otto could now remember that more clearly than the awful blur of the fighting he had just lived through. It had been a beautiful spring morning, blue sky hazy with the first heat of the day, but with a thin film of dust hanging in the air and covering everything around them. What had really shocked him had been the bare trees. That previous evening they had been covered in luminous cherry blossom, now blown off in a single brutal moment.

What I liked: The perspective of the effects of the war on ordinary people living n Berlin, particularly the children struggling to survive. The juxtaposition of the beauty of life and the horrors of war and the unexpectedness of tragedy.

Even better if: I felt that the ending as quite abrupt - I would have liked to see more of Ulrich's response to the post-war period, particularly as he was still struggling to change his views.

How you could use it in your classroom: It would be an interesting read for anyone studying the Second World War; although it does not 'teach' much of what happened, it provides a viewpoint that many may not have considered by showing how children in Berlin would have been affected by events happening in other parts of the world.

I was hopeful for this novel, because I love the WW2 setting and historical novels in this context. But... it fell flat. 

It was particularly tell-y, and it jerked me out of reading. Like an "and over there we have..." situation, where it's obviously pointing where to look or what to feel at any given moment. Dialogue felt stilted, as though the author described the characters' emotions rather than allow us to feel them authentically while we lived their story.

I didn't feel either that we were in the setting of World War 2 - while it was a really interesting concept unfortunately it didn't pay off and I DNF'd at 10%