Book Review: Girl in the Blue Coat

By Monica Hesse

From the back cover:
Amsterdam, 1943. Hanneke spends her days procuring and delivering sought-after black market goods to paying customers, her nights hiding the true nature of her work from her concerned parents, and every waking moment mourning her boyfriend, who was killed on the Dutch front lines when the Germans invaded. She likes to think of her illegal work as a small act of rebellion.

On a routine delivery, a client asks Hanneke for help. Expecting to hear that Mrs. Janssen wants meat or kerosene, Hanneke is shocked by the older woman's frantic plea to find a person--a Jewish teenager Mrs. Janssen had been hiding, who has vanished without a trace from a secret room. Hanneke initially wants nothing to do with such dangerous work, but is ultimately drawn into a web of mysteries and stunning revelations that lead her into the heart of the resistance, open her eyes to the horrors of the Nazi war machine, and compel her to take desperate action.​

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​Girl in the Blue Coat is a fast-paced, exciting adventure story that will grab you by the heart strings. Hanneke is a sympathetic lead, a young woman whose idealistic outlook has been severely damaged by the realities of war. Living in an occupied country means confronting small acts of treason every day, performed by friends, neighbors, relatives, even loved ones. But Hanneke's new-found cynicism doesn't account for the other side of the truth: that even in the midst of a great evil, great courage still exists. As she goes deeper into Amsterdam's resistance movement, she's forced to face not only great danger - but her own deeply buried guilt. 

This is simply a great story, a roller-coaster ride full of intrigue, romance, and classic adventure, from stealing Nazi uniforms to infiltrating enemy offices and solving murder mysteries. Warning: once you get thirty pages in, you won't be able to stop reading, so set aside enough time.

Highly recommended.