Rescue

Meg Kenyon and her British father have always shared a love of deciphering secret codes, so when he is called away from their home on the France-Germany border on a mysterious WWII mission with the Allies, he leaves a jarful of codes for her continued practice. Nearly two years after his departure, 12-year-old Meg and her French mother and grandmother are living under Nazi occupation on Grandmère's farm. Meg sells their produce on the black market and secretly works with the Resistance, leaving coded messages about the Nazis as warnings to other Resistance fighters. When she learns her father may be imprisoned, Meg goes on her own dangerous mission, secreting three German strangers out of France, one of whom has the power to rescue him. Nielsen (the Ascendance series) builds suspense through constantly shifting suspicions and loyalties, combined with the foursome's risky journey. Whom should Meg trust? Has she interpreted her father's recent coded letter correctly? Is she leading her group into or away from danger? Determined and stubborn Meg makes a believable--if occasionally two-dimensional--protagonist, and her story is well-paced and absorbing, with complicated plotting that rewards careful reading. Ages 8--12. Agent: Ammi-Joan Paquette, Erin Murphy Literary. (Mar.)

A 12-year-old Resistance fighter must decode her father's final message and save him. Meggie hasn't seen her British father in two years, ever since the Nazis invaded France and Papa left to fight. She and her French mother have left their home close to the border with Germany and are living with her French grandmother on a farm in a rural part of the Occupied Zone. Meggie discovers Capt. Henry Stewart, an injured Englishman, in her family's barn, and he gives her a poem that her father wrote. He also asks her to take a family on the run to safety; in exchange, they will reveal the whereabouts of Meggie's father, a spy on the run. The plot suffers from the ultimate deus ex machina, a backpack Capt. Stewart gives Meggie that contains every item she will ever need--a spy manual, money, blank ration cards, explosives, and a map (covering over 100 kilometers yet still so detailed it shows individual buildings in a Parisian suburb)--which is somehow never lost or searched by the Nazis. Meanwhile, Meggie solves each piece of the coded poem exactly in time to use the specific information revealed. While the premise is an exciting one and the subject matter is an unusual spin on World War II stories, the novel fails to generate sufficient suspense to maintain readers' interest. Fails to stand out. (secret codes, historical information) (Historical fiction. 10-14) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.