It’s rare that I pick up a historical fiction (something that I’m trying to change) and even rarer that I gravitate towards one about WWII.

The thing is, if I want to read about historical events, I usually want it to shine light on something I don’t already know a lot about, a time period that isn’t taught again and again in school. Plus, there are so many books that focus on the Holocaust it’s hard to know which to pick up and what new insights it brings to the over-saturated topic.

Which means that if The Girl in the Blue Coat had not been gifted to me (thanks Mom!) I never would have picked it up. 

So it’s a good thing it was. 

“We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them.”

The Girl in the Blue Coat focuses on Hanneke, a girl living in Amsterdam at the time of the war, who has made a job of finding things for people, usually black market goods. But when someone asks her to use her skills to find a person, she’ll end up deeper in the world of the resistance than she ever wanted to go.

Seeing the perspective of people living in Amsterdam was fascinating to me, as well as the work of the black market and glimpses of the resistance, all of which I hadn’t yet seen in a book like this.

“Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out.”

At the heart of this book is (of course) the story of the war, of the resistance, and a large part of it is about grief, yet it follows the much more familiar plot structures of a mystery story as we follow Henneke’s search for the girl in the blue coat. This aspect was what kept me reading the story so ravenously, as I couldn’t foresee what would occur and was often surprised by the twists and turns the story made. 

Eventually, this book dives into the darker subject matter than I was expecting, but for the most part, the story is more subdued than I would expect from a book about the war, likely because of its YA-intended-audience. 

Maybe just because I’ve been numbed by so many gritty, gory, books, but it almost felt a bit too mild for a book of this nature. There are plenty of other WWII stories meant for YA audiences that dive into the dark parts, so I almost felt like this one was holding back. But then again, it’s good to have stories that are more accessible to sensitive readers…Not that this book doesn’t come with trigger warnings, don’t get me wrong. And I have to commend this story on touching on topics I hadn’t yet seen discussed in a WWII book, although I would have liked them to go even deeper.

“I think it’s possible to be healed without feeling whole.”

I’ve seen in other reviews that this story certainly succeeded in making other people emotional, but I personally felt it lacked some of the descriptions I needed, and instead fell a little too much into narration, to make me invested enough for heartbreak.

I rated The Girl in the Blue Coat 4 out of 5 stars and I’m so glad this book was able to remind me that I should pick up more like it (including, perhaps, more of Monica Hesse’s work).