I've been a bad book blogger. Last BookCon, I picked up a couple of books that I had every intention of reviewing in a timely fashion but life got in the way. One of those books was a signed copy of The Girl with the Red Balloon, a YA book about a teenage girl named Ellie who visits present-day Germany on a class trip but ends up time traveling to 1988 East Berlin. That's right - before the fall of the Berlin Wall and on the OTHER side of the wall. She's not totally clear how she ended up in 1988 East Berlin, but it all happened when she grabbed hold of a red balloon.Once in 1988, she meets Kai and Mitzi, balloon runners who are helping people get across the wall through magic red balloons. Turns out, magic balloons have been helping people escape oppression for years in all sorts of places. But can magic balloons help Ellie get back to the future?
This book is a reminder about what happened in the past but that the things that happened in the past are what shape the future, and hopefully keep bad things from happening again. There's a lot that we can learn from the past, and just like the character of Ellie, we can all be sponges, soaking up as much information as we can and never stopping asking questions.
Some of the talk about the balloon magic and the math and the physics was a little confusing to me, but I just let it go over my head and suspended my disbelief because I knew that it was fiction anyway (magic balloons don't really exist, do they??).
The book is for ages 13 and up, and is published by Albert Whitman & Company. I received a free Advance Reading Copy at BookCon 2017 with no obligation to review.
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