Review: "The Girl Who Sang" by Estelle Nadel and Sammy Savos

The Girl Who Sang by Estelle Nadel and Sammy Savos
Published January 2024 via Roaring Brook Press
★★★★

As a child in Poland, Enia Feld (later Estelle Nadel) loved to sing—but when the Nazis came to power and Germany invaded Poland, singing—and just about everything else in her life—became dangerous. What followed were harrowing years and an impossible scope of loss...but also incredible love and resiliance.

This makes for a lovely and detailed, if heartbreaking, look at one young Jewish girl's experience surviving the Holocaust. It's written for an MG/YA audience, so although violence is not shied away from, it's never gratuitous. Children the age of the target reader—to say nothing of children Enia's age—shouldn't have to think about these things, but such as the world is...if it has to be talked about (and it does), this is an age-appropriate way to do so. The losses are multiple and tremendous, but the authors choose to put more of the focus on hope, and on the people who were instrumental to Enia's survival.

The art is a bit simpler than I'd prefer, though I suppose that's at least partly a reflection of Enia's young age in the book and also of the target audience. I love that, in addition to seeing Enia's struggle throughout the Holocaust—the struggle to find somewhere to hide, to find enough to eat, to stay together as a family, to protect loved ones, to keep from imperiling those helping them, to escape—we see so much of her life after the war...because the war might have been over, but the struggle was not. I also love how much of this is a love letter to Enia's family, but in particular her brother, who stepped up again and again and again. So many people in this story had to grow up too fast, and he is no exception, but...well, sometimes it is striking what a child, or near-child, can and will do when adults are unwilling or unable to step up in the same way.