Review: "Over and Out" by Jenni Walsh

Over and Out by Jenni Walsh
Published March 2022 via Scholastic
★★★

I read The Berlin Letters recently and got curious (again) about life behind the Iron Curtain, so...I poked around to see what YA/MG lit has to say about it. In Over and Out, Sophie lives a decent life in East Berlin—decent, but fragile. Her mother's white-collar job means that Sophie will likely be assigned a blue-collar job when she is older rather than be able to follow her dreams to be an inventor. And when Sophie's teenaged neighbor falls afoul of the state, Sophie is asked to be a snitch—with terrible consequences if she doesn't comply. There's only one thing to do: escape over the Wall.

What strikes me most about the (limited amount of) East Germany fiction I've read is that books tend to focus on one thing: escape. Sometimes it's getting somebody else out, and sometimes it's getting the protagonist out, but either way the West represents a happy ending. And...don't get me wrong, I understand why, but at the same time, the vast marjority of those living in East Germany were, well, there until the Wall fell.


Sophie's escape route (no spoilers) feels like a stretch to me, but it is based on real events. The lengths to which people went to get out feel unfathomable to me, and yet when I put them in a present-day context—refugees piling into boats to get to Europe, say, or struggling through the Darién Gap, or perching precariously on a ship rudder—it feels markedly less wild to think that someone, or thousands of someones, might try to get across a wall. I would have liked more details focused on life in East Berlin (or the rest of East Germany) rather than a primary focus on escape, but this makes for a good introduction for MG readers.