Number the Stars

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It's hard to believe that I wrote Number the Stars more than twenty years ago. It seems like yesterday that I answered the phone on a snowy January morning and received the news that it had been awarded the 1990 Newbery Medal.

Most books published that long ago have faded into a pleasant, undisturbed retirement on dusty library shelves, or become an occasional topic for a research paper. But Number the Stars seems to have acquired its own long and vibrant life; not a day goes by that I don't hear from a passionate reader of the book—some of them parents who remember it from their childhood and are now reading it with their own children.

I think readers of every age match themselves against the protagonists of books they love. Would I have done that? they ask themselves as they follow a fictional character through a novel. What choice would I have made?

And ten—the age of Annemarie in Number the Stars, and the approximate age of most of the book's readers—is an age when young people are beginning to develop a strong set of personal ethics. They want to be honorable people. They want to do the right thing. And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.

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