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    The Girl with the Red Balloon
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    The Girl with the Red Balloon
    Unavailable
    The Girl with the Red Balloon
    Ebook319 pages5 hours

    The Girl with the Red Balloon

    By Katherine Locke

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    When sixteen-year-old Ellie Baum accidentally time-travels via red balloon to 1988 East Berlin, she's caught up in a conspiracy of history and magic. She meets members of an underground guild in East Berlin who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the Wall—but even to the balloon makers, Ellie's time travel is a mystery. When it becomes clear that someone is using dark magic to change history, Ellie must risk everything—including her only way home—to stop the process.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAW Teen
    Release dateSep 1, 2017
    ISBN9780807529355
    Unavailable
    The Girl with the Red Balloon
    Author

    Katherine Locke

    Katherine Locke lives and writes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she's ruled by her feline overlords and her addiction to chai lattes. Her day jobs always vary, but in the past, she's worked in nuclear weapons abolition activism, lead poisoning prevention and education, and food safety at a mushroom farm. She secretly believes most stories are fairy tales in disguise. She likes heroines with dirty mouths and heroes with boyish charm. Find her on Twitter @bibliogato!

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    Reviews for The Girl with the Red Balloon

    4/5

    55 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I thought it was well written. You'd be surprised at how many books out there are badly written. Dan Brown, for instance. I love time travel books and movies in general. I could tell that it was written by a woman. There's character development instead of just plot plot plot. James Patterson, for instance. I like character development. There might have been a bit too much emphasis on the love story. This will work great as a movie, because it has something for both men and women.
    • 3/5
      This book was an easy read, but I can't say it was particularly impressive. It tells the story of Ellie, an all-American (and Jewish) schoolgirl who goes to Berlin on a school trip, touches the string of a red balloon, and finds herself instantly transported back in time to the eastern side of the city in 1988. She finds out that the red balloons are part of a long-term people smuggling operation: a clandestine magical organisation exists which creates these balloons to transport people out of dangerous places. With no obvious way to return home, she crashes in an organisational safe house with two other young people, immediately throws herself into a corny and unnecessary romance with one of them, and then gets caught up investigating a string of red-balloon-related murders.

      While the bulk of the book takes place in 1988, there are also a number of chapters set 45 years earlier, where a Jewish boy relays his experience living through the Holocaust. These chapters were naturally pretty grim, but I also felt that they were by far the best part of the book. The Nazis' cruelty was viscerally clear, but we also saw people striving to resist: admiring the resistance put up by other ghettos, covertly practising their faith, communicating illegally with people outside the ghetto. This plotline could not fail to be tragic, but it was heartfelt and powerful.

      Unfortunately I cannot say anything similar for the East Berlin chapters, at least not in regards to how they depicted their setting. In these, there is a lot of editorialising to keep reminding the reader that East Germany is a horrible, oppressive police state while the West is a beacon of freedom. It's an irritatingly trite take, and the book would have been better served by leaving those remarks out and just showing us what East Germany was like, you know, through the story. What did come across in the story felt like a more nuanced take, if still a bit surface-level in some respects – but perhaps that's to be expected when both POV characters in 1988 are outsiders to the country.

      I thought Ellie, the protagonist, was pretty annoying. She has a really interesting plot thread to do with her Jewish faith and her family history (her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, did not want her to go to Germany in the first place)… but it's also her POV chapters doing the bulk of the "Americans good, East Germans bad" thing. Kai and Mitzi, the other members of the trio, were much more likeable as far as I was concerned. All the other 1988 characters felt kind of generic, and the denouement lacked impact as a result. (I also thought it was unnecessary to have a whoooole thing stressing to the reader that Nazis are really, super evil, like you could have read the book up to that point and not got that.)

      Despite this review being mostly negative, I did enjoy reading the book overall. The story moves along well, the prose is pleasant to read, there were a bunch of interesting passages, and I enjoyed the whole story thread about Ellie's heritage. I think I feel particularly frustrated because it was an idea with a lot of potential, but some fundamental mistakes (like the extraneous romance subplot and the simplistic depiction of East Berlin) really let it down. (May 2019)
    • 4/5
      I really, really liked this book! I don’t read historical fiction too much; my knowledge of history isn’t what I’d like it to be and I guess I worry that I won’t really get what’s going on. But I’ve begun to learn that that’s the beauty of historical fiction; we can learn so much from it.

      I knew the basics about the Berlin Wall, and there wasn’t much historical knowledge necessary here. It was mostly the characters that pulled me in. The storyline was great - I always love a good time-travel novel - but I so loved the characters. Kai and Ellie... I’m not sure if I’ll ever give up on those two. Benno’s story absolutely broke my heart, as did the last page of the book.

      I’ll admit that I was disappointing at where it ended. The ending seemed rushed and I really wanted to know what happened when Ellie got home. Did she return to the same day she disappeared from? Did she lose time in her real life? I have so many unanswered questions, which makes me hope for a sequel.
    • 4/5
      This book really surprised me; my library was promoting the eBook so I gave it a shot and it was SO worth it. I loved the story and the romance and the idea of the balloons, but did NOT like the cliffhanger ending. Book 2 came out this month so I'm moving it to the top of my list.
    • 3/5
      An American teenager accidentally travels in time to East Berlin by a red balloon.I was intrigued by the idea. Unfortunately the outcome doesn't stand up to expectations. This is a lazy book: lazy world building (I have so many questions about the Magic...), lazy plotting and lazy characterization. The three main characters were a Jew, a Roma and a Lesbian, and that's pretty much what we learn about them. They have no personalities beyond "colorful" or "steady". Because of that, the romance is just... well, it's there and that's about it. There's actually no plot in this book either; most of the time nothing happens and nothing is revealed. There is a mystery, and that's the best part of the novel - in fact the villain is the most interesting character in the book, and I'd like to read their story instead of this uninteresting tripe. On the other hand, the novel was quite well written. If only the content was up to par...
    • 4/5
      I was not aware of anything about this book. I think I decided to download it because it was on a book list or book recommendation somewhere. It is a young adult novel set in Berlin, Germany. It is the first in a series.
      I grew to really like Ellie Baum, and Kai and Mitzi, the main characters in the book. While it is a bit of fantasy / magic, it really brings forth the question on what you would do if you could remake / change history. Would it be better or worse, or should you not try to change it?
      This was an interesting take on the holocaust, and its repercussions on those who survived and future generations.
      There is a 2nd book in the series which I will read to see how the story develops.
      #TheGirlWithTheRedBalloon #KatherineLocke
    • 4/5
      I really, really liked this book! I don’t read historical fiction too much; my knowledge of history isn’t what I’d like it to be and I guess I worry that I won’t really get what’s going on. But I’ve begun to learn that that’s the beauty of historical fiction; we can learn so much from it.

      I knew the basics about the Berlin Wall, and there wasn’t much historical knowledge necessary here. It was mostly the characters that pulled me in. The storyline was great - I always love a good time-travel novel - but I so loved the characters. Kai and Ellie... I’m not sure if I’ll ever give up on those two. Benno’s story absolutely broke my heart, as did the last page of the book.

      I’ll admit that I was disappointing at where it ended. The ending seemed rushed and I really wanted to know what happened when Ellie got home. Did she return to the same day she disappeared from? Did she lose time in her real life? I have so many unanswered questions, which makes me hope for a sequel.
    • 4/5
      Bringing two periods of history together in a time travel fantasy creates a masterful thriller. When Ellie grabs hold of a red balloon on a class trip to post Soviet Berlin, she finds herself in East Berlin a year before the wall came down, as she becomes a member of a group of magicians who secret people out of East Germany. But the story goes farther back than that, to when her grandfather was carried out of a Nazi extermination camp by a girl with a red balloon. The three periods of time are deftly woven together and I’m hoping to find out more about Ellie and her East German friends in the next book---I am assuming there will be another book. The reader is left wanting to know more.
    • 4/5
      While on a school trip to Berlin, 16-year-old Ellie Baum grabs hold of a red balloon that transports her back to 1988 East Berlin. She’s discovered by Kai, a Romani Runner who helps transport people over the Berlin Wall to freedom. The Runners work with Schöpfers, magicians who write mathematical equations on the red balloons that are used for transportation. Kai and his Runner partner, Mitzi, keep Ellie in a safe house until they can figure out how to get her back to her own time. When other dead time travelers begin to appear, the three become increasingly afraid that one of the Schöpfers has gone rogue.This isn’t the kind of book I would normally pick up – young adult, historical fantasy, teen romance. It was selected as this quarter’s OverDrive Big Read, and when I saw that the plot has a Holocaust connection, I decided to check it out. I enjoyed it more than I expected to. I was fascinated by the setting in East Berlin just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The three main characters have a heightened sense of danger because they belong to socially unacceptable groups. Ellie is Jewish, Kai is Romani, and Mitzi is lesbian. The characters wrestle with questions of good and evil and the moral obligations of individuals in a totalitarian society. The Holocaust and survivors guilt have a role in the story. I was a bit disappointed with the ending. Kai’s sister figured out a way to send Ellie back to her own time, but the book ended without telling readers if she really made it home and what happened when she arrived.
    • 3/5
      Sixteen-year-old Ellie Baum and her classmates are visiting Germany. When she spots a red balloon, she tells her best friend to take a picture so she can show her grandfather when she returns to the United States. But by grabbing that red balloon Ellie is taken back in time to East Berlin in 1988. There she meets members of an organization who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the wall to West Berlin. But to the balloon makers, Ellie’s time travel is a mystery. Eventually it becomes clear that someone is using dark magic to change history and Ellie wants to do everything she can to stop them, even if it means never returning home again.

      There are three points-of-view: Ellie's when she briefly travels to Germany in present time then travels back to 1988 where the rest of her story is told, Kai's who is a Runner, someone who helps people get over the wall, and Benno's back in the 1940's in a Polish ghetto. This is such an interesting concept - using balloons to send people over the Berlin Wall. But there was something about this book that didn't quite make it as enjoyable as I'd hoped. I liked the characters, but I felt as though, except for Benno, we only scratched the surface of who they really were. The writing itself was just okay - sometimes the characters were overly dramatic. I think this book may appeal more to younger readers.

      Thank you to Netgalley and Albert Whitman & Company for a copy of this book.