Booktalk #1

It is June 6, 1944--D-Day. Over the course of five years, most of the world has been fighting the Nazis. This day is different though. In an unequaled spirit of unity and cooperation, troops from the United States, Canada, France, and the UK team up to land on the beaches of France and take the fight to the Nazis.  

 Allies begins in the predawn hours of D-Day and follows seven main characters and the roles they play in this ultimate fight.  With a focus on Dee, a sixteen-year-old American soldier, the story allows us to experience the terror a soldier feels as he races toward the French coast. Gratz deftly weaves together the stories of an African-American medic, a Canadian paratrooper, and French resistance fighters to show the sweeping expanse of this invasion and fight. 

Ultimately, Allies is about ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary moment in history, and the notion that we are always stronger together. (New Hampshire Great Stone Face Award, 2021)

Booktalk #2

Dee, Samira, James and Henry did not know each other, but they all four played a big role in their country’s part of World War II. Obviously this story is a work of fiction, but people such as these characters existed during the war. Dee was a sixteen-year-old U.S soldier that stormed Omaha Beach, Samira was an eleven-year-old French girl who worked as a spy, James was a Canadian paratrooper and Corporal Henry Allen, was a medic and worked tirelessly to help the wounded on that monumental day, otherwise known as D-Day. This is their story, of how their life passed in front of their eyes in one single, monumental day. (Oklahoma Sequoyah Book Awards, 2021)

Booktalk #3

June 6, 1944: D-Day. As the allies invade Normandy in the hopes of defeating the Nazis, nine voices, ranging from a teenage American soldier to a French-Algerian girl working for the Resistance, tell their gripping stories of what happened on a day that changed the course of World War II – and the 20th century – forever. Historical Fiction. (Rhode Island Middle School Book Award 2021)