Number the Stars 25th Anniversary

Annemarie Johansen and Ellen Rosen are best friends. Their families live in the same apartment building, and the girls go to school together. Life seems very good even though the city is occupied by the Nazis and there are soldiers on every corner. Being ten years old sometimes offers a kind of protection from reality. At least until the reality becomes too hard to ignore, and that is what happens when word surfaces that the Nazis are planning on “relocating” all the Jews in Denmark. The girls must face fears they never imagined existed before, and they must learn to be braver than they could have ever dreamed they would need to be.

Lois Lowry wrote this Newbery winning novel 25 years ago to tell the story of how the Danes smuggled virtually every Jew out of Denmark under the noses of the Nazis and their frightening dogs. She frames this amazing story with a fiction that is so well researched and beautifully imagined that it feels very real. This 25th Anniversary Edition speaks to the importance of this story and what a classic novel it has become in middle-grade literature. Anyone who has not read it should find time.