When I saw that Alice Hoffman wrote a YA book about Anne Frank I knew I had to request it because I was curious to see how she would tell her story. Turns out I was right to be because this was very different from what I was expecting, but in a good way. This was the author’s imaginative take on what Anne’s life would have been like before she went into hiding, beginning when she was just a small child experiencing the worsening conditions for Jews in the Netherlands. The story takes a look at the Frank family dynamics as they start to realize that the optimism that they once shares may have been misplaced and that good doesn’t always defeat evil.
There’s a lot of symbolism in the story (wolves, black moths, etc) and that may be lost on some readers but it was definitely vividly depicted. It definitely has Hoffman’s distinct flair for poetic prose and she definitely put in the rock to research the story.
Thanks to Scholastic Press and NetGalley for this eArc in exchange for my review.

Alice Hoffman's "When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary" is a touching tribute to Anne Frank's story. Hoffman portrays a poignant picture of one of history's most beloved figures, offering readers a glimpse into Anne Frank's life before the fear of Nazi occupation took over. In her novel, Hoffman provides an emotional portrayal of Anne's vibrant spirit and courage, which ultimately define her legacy.
Hoffman adeptly captures Anne's bold personality, sharp wit, mischief, and growing wisdom. The image of Anne painted in the book is that of a real girl with her own dreams, fears, and passions.
"When We Flew Away" is a tribute. Hoffman has created a novel that strikes a brilliant balance between history and fiction. It's clear to the reader that Hoffman has conducted meticulous research and crafted a novel that fully immerses the reader in the historical context. As tensions increased with the rise of Nazi occupation, Hoffman offers readers haunting details of the mounting fear and terror that the Frank family experienced. Despite the turmoil, Hoffman never loses sight of Anne's remarkable humanity, a testament to both her strength and vulnerability.
If Anne Frank's diary touched your heart, then 'When We Flew Away' is a must-read.

This was a wonderful age appropriate story of what Anne Franks’s like was like prior to goi g into hiding. Alice Hoffman Duda fabulous job of keeping violence out of the story so it would be suitable for our younger readers. I think this should be required reading by the 6th grade. We must remember.

Anne Frank and her family lived in the Netherlands before the Nazis began accumulating power and restricting more and more freedoms of the people. This is the story of her life before they went into hiding, which was detailed in her now famous diary, published posthumously by her bereaved father.

I was drawn to this book mostly because of Alice Hoffman's skill in writing deeply emotional novels. This book outlines the Frank family's life in the Netherlands after they left Germany ahead of Kristallnacht. They were lucky, as most countries in that period had quotas for Jewish refugees, or closed their borders entirely. We see Anne with friends, with her sister, with her parents and grandmother. As years pass, there are bombs, Germans invading, school closures, and fewer things that Jews were allowed to do. It grew harder for Anne's parents to hide it from her or her older sister Margot.

If you've ever read Miep's story in addition to Anne Frank's diary, then you'll recognize parts of this book. Those that the Franks were friends with had tried their best to get them out of the country, then to hide them. It's heartbreaking to see how the Dutch children fell in line with the Nazis and began harassing Jewish children as if they hadn't been friends the year before, how soldiers threatened people, and the tenor of the city changed to one of fear. We know how that story ends, which makes each page closer to the end that much more heartbreaking. Some of the conversations are fictionalized and extrapolated from what we do know, which serves to flesh out all of these people. This is a novel that should help the reader remember the past and ensure it never happens again.

Title: When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary
By: Alice Hoffman

Pub. Date:
September 17, 2024


Genre:
Middle Grade, Fiction, Holocaust, WWII

Red Flags:
Death, Loss, Trauma, Grief, Holocaust

Favorite Quotes:
“When you write it down, they cannot pretend it never happened.”
“Dreams are the beginning, he always told Anne. They’re the stories we tell ourselves.”
“Fear has a way of staying with you, even when you tell yourself you're safe.”

Summary:
The Netherlands are invaded by the Nazi’s and life begins to shift and change for the Frank Family. Anne is a typical 13 year old, inquisitive, determined and full of life. With a strong relationship with her sister Margot and a love for her family, especially Oma, the author has recreated loveable characters, filled with dreams. The author engages the reader with a plotline demonstrating the simplicity of life, prior to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The mood of the book begins to shift as the signs of war slowly manifest into the full fledged war.

Review:
Hoffman does a wonderful job preparing the reader for the life before the Frank family goes into hiding. I felt the familial relationships were realistic, and the characters were likable. My concern with the novel is the target audience.

As a middle school educator, I’m very reluctant this book will capture the hearts of middle grade readers, there isn’t enough suspense and depth, however, paired as a read aloud, using talking points prior to the class novel of “The Diary of Anne Frank” when paired together both novels would increase student engagement, understanding and overall empathy for Anne Frank.

The four stars when considering the middle grade audience. It can be trickier for adult authors to navigate writing middle grade fiction. As an adult, I enjoyed the additional information and perspective leading up to Anne’s story, the story we’ve all come to know and love for years!

Thank you Alice Hoffman, Scholastic, and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader Copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.
#Whenweflewaway
#scholastic
#alicehoffman
#reluctantreaderreads
#advancedreadercopies
#netgalley

When We Flew Away is an honest, provocative look at what Anne Frank’s life may have been like before going into hiding. It’s a great book to accompany her famous diary, to use with a study of the Holocaust, or with creative writing students. Though fiction, it’s written after much research and feels like prequel to Frank’s diary.

It’s easy for us sitting here in our comfy Western lives to pass judgements about what people did or didn’t do as the Nazis cracked down on the Jewish people in Europe, but the truth is that their plans, while not held in total secrecy, were so horrible as to be unfathomable. When We Flew Away is the kind of book that allows us a glimpse into the heart and mind of those people. It allows us to see their struggles, their pain, their hopes and dreams and gives us the opportunity to understand them.

Mixed in with the story are bits of historical truths: bits of information unknown to the Franks and their contemporaries but the consequences of what they were experiencing at the time. These help to put the context firmly into place, no matter how knowledgeable the reader may be.

When We Fly Away has the potential to add new layers of learning to students of Anne Frank’s work. I hope you’ll read it yourself.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

I, like many others, have read books about Anne Frank in the past. I have also read books by Hoffman, so I was interested in reading this one. It is a fictional story of what life could have been like for Anne and her family before they went into hiding. I did find the pace a bit slow. The omniscient point of view is not commonly used in books I read, so it was a bit harder to feel fully connected to the characters. The author's notes are a helpful addition to the book. The author does do a nice job of making Anne a bit more relatable children. I think this would be a good story to hear is an audiobook.

When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman, 304 pages. Scholastic Press, 2024. $16.
Language: G (0 swears, 0 “f”); Mature Content: PG; Violence: PG
BUYING ADVISORY: MS - ADVISABLE
APPEALS TO: SEVERAL
Before Anne Frank started writing in her diary, she lived a—mostly—normal life. Sure, her family fled to the Netherlands when Germany started imposing extra rules onto those of Jewish descent, but Anne (10yo) loved going to school and got into arguments with her mother and talked through math class. Until the night everything changed.
Hoffman flits between the whimsical Anne with poetic imaginings and the heavy facts of regulations on the Jewish people and death statistics. This fictitious prequel to The Diary of a Young Girl paints every member of Anne Frank’s family with mercy. Anne’s diary shows the difficulty that Anne had with her relationships with her mother and older sister, and Hoffman suggests that each of these characters could still have been motivated with love as they struggled to deal with this difficult time.
Anne and her family are German and Jewish. The mature content rating is for mentions of alcohol and illegal activity. The violence rating is for assault, death, and mentions of war, hate crimes, bombing, holocaust, and concentration camps.
Review: Carolina Herdegen

An absolute masterpiece! I loved getting to know Anne and her family before they went into hiding. Anyone who read her diary will never forget Anne Frank but reading this part of her life reminds us of what life may have been like before. As an adult it has encouraged me to go back and read her Diary again. It is a stain in history that we must never forget. Thank you Alice Hoffman for bringing a beautiful light onto the life of a girl we all thought we knew.

I am huge fan of this author but this arc came through so weird on my kindle it was hard to read. Excited to see people’s legit reviews.

"When We Flew Away" is a fictionalized account of Anne's years in Amsterdam after the invasion by the Nazis but before her family goes into hiding. Young readers will surely connect with young Anne as they get to know her in these pages, either because they've read her diary or because they will now be inspired to. I so wanted this to be a 5-star review, except that there was one glaring issue...

With a title like "When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary," I was expecting just that, a novel. I was hoping that Hoffman had written a fictionalized account in Anne's voice to help young readers connect with her during ages 10 to 13 of her life. However, this reads more like a didactic piece of nonfiction with Hoffman reporting events from Anne's younger years. It's all the more confusing, then, to read in the afterword "much of her life between the ages of ten and thirteen is invented in the pages of my novel." If Hoffman was going to write a historical fiction novel based on the one person from history who brings many young readers to the realization of the horrors of the attempted genocide of World War II, I wish she would have attempted to write it with Anne's unique voice. I wanted Hoffman to show us, rather than tell us, what Anne was like in these years. However, because of the value of this work, I'll keep it at 4 stars instead of 3.

Other teachers looking for clean, safe reads for their shelves should know that there are no content warnings for this one. My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this eARC provided in exchange for my honest review.

This was a wonderful companion novel to Anne Frank's diary. It tells the story of Anne's family move to Amsterdam and the events that lead up to them going in hiding. It explores the family relationships and hopes.

We hear from Anne's inner thoughts as she struggles with the changes around her. I enjoyed hearing about her friends, frustration with rules and overall childhood dynamic. I think this book adds to her story to show readers she was a regular girl before she had to go into hiding. I certainly learned things I did not know.

I think this book could appeal to many age groups as it was easy to read. The horrors were implied but not vivid. I did appreciate that. Thank you Netgalley for this chance to review this book.

Nearly every middle school student where I live is required to read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” so I was intrigued when I saw this book about exploring Anne and her family’s lives before the diary began.

The story begins with the Frank family having already relocated to the Netherlands, because it was a neutral country during the war. Anne is nearly 11 years old and enjoying her childhood filled with hopes, dreams, and freedom. The story slowly progresses over the next two years by exploring the changes that happened once Germany invaded the Netherlands and what happened to them and other Jewish people they knew.

I really liked that this book explained that Anne has not been raised as a religious Jew. Her family had more modern beliefs that they were simply German. It wasn’t until the Nazis came to power that she realized her family was labeled as Jews and were considered “different.” It was heartbreaking to read the passages where young Anne realized that her family was living in constant fear.

The story is slow-paced and repeatedly uses imagery like black moths, birds, and wolves to describe the darkness and danger heading towards the Frank family in a more indirect way for younger readers. However, since Anne’s diary is meant for a middle grade and older audience, I felt this book could have been a bit more direct and explained more about what was going on without going into graphic detail.

I would highly recommend this book for middle school students to read right after they’ve read Anne’s diary. As an adult, I think the author’s creation of this story was intriguing, and I really liked the strong family dynamic displayed between Anne and her sister, Anne and her father, Anne and her grandmother, and Anne and her mother. I would just recommend reading the diary again beforehand to reconnect with the characters and the story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scholastic Press for the opportunity to read an advanced reader's copy of this book for an honest review.

This is the story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life. It is based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, It begins before the war, when nothing had changed for Anne and her family, and then shows how slowly, blow-by-blow the occupation happened, and how restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

I remember reading The Diary Of Anne Frank in school and being so moved by it. Then now, we are going through a time once again where people are denying the Holocaust ever happened, who are glorifying Nazis who are spouting Nazi rhetoric and it is terrifying. This timely book is good for readers of The Diary Of Anne Frank at any age, young or old.

“The Franks were outsiders again, and it was just the beginning, only they didn’t know it.”

Before the Frank family started living in the Secret Annex as the Holocaust progressed, they first had to watch their old lives fall apart piece by piece. Anne Frank was an ordinary Jewish girl, but she was also bright enough to think critically about what was going on around her. She began her classic diary in June of 1942 at the tail end of her freedom. When We Flew Away is Alice Hoffman’s imagining of Anne Frank’s life before she moved into hiding, starting when Anne was just a child experiencing worsening conditions for Jews in the Netherlands. The book explores the Frank family dynamic as they slowly come to realize that their optimism may have been misplaced and that good does not always win out over evil.

Although When We Flew Away is centered around Anne, we occasionally get to see the situation from other perspectives, like those of her parents, grandmother, and sister, Margot. I found these perspectives to be the most impactful because the actual accounts of the family members are, for the most part, lost to history. In the diary, Anne has a notoriously bad relationship with her mother, so it was nice to see Edith Frank portrayed in a more tender light, doing the best she could to protect her girls. It was heartbreaking that Otto Frank, the pillar of his daughter's strength in the diary, was portrayed as losing hope that things would get better. The incremental changes that led up to the Holocaust’s consequences were excellently and tragically depicted through poetic writing, which Anne might have appreciated. Even so, some may find the symbolism excessive, with the vicious wolves lying in wait and the repeated reference to wicked black moths both representing the evil forces of the era. Oftentimes, Anne’s vibrant personality got lost amidst the symbolism. Though the Anne described in When We Flew Away uses empathy to inform her insights, the real Anne is better known for having used her logic and linguistic skills to make observations. While the real Anne’s analytical voice is nearly impossible to recreate, the Anne in this book came across as rather quiet and passive by comparison. Even though Hoffman effectively highlights the rising feeling of helplessness among Jews during the Holocaust, the inability to capture Anne's lively spirit causes the book to be less captivating than
it might have been.

What was Anne Frank's life like before she had to go into hiding with her family? Hoffman did extensive research to write this work of historical fiction. This book left me wondering who the audience might be. There are much better historical fiction books written for middle grade readers about the Holocaust than this. This really is a book for devoted readers of Anne Frank's diary, who often would be older than the target audience for this book.

When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman centers on the life of Anne Frank, before the war. We also experience Anne’s sister Margot and everything that happened to the family before the Nazis invaded Holland.

This is beautifully written and gives us a look at what Anne’s life may have been like including her friendships, her family, and the love she had for her grandmother. You cannot possibly read this and not feel an emotional tug.

This is a young adult novel but can be appreciated by all ages.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has captivated and inspired readers for decades. Published posthumously by her bereaved father, Anne’s journal, written while she and her family were in hiding during World War II, has become one of the central texts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, as well as a work of literary genius.

With the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family’s life is turned inside out, blow by blow, restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

Amid impossible danger, Anne, audacious, creative, and fearless, discovers who she truly is. With a wisdom far beyond her years, she will become a writer who will go on to change the world as we know it.

Critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman weaves a lyrical and heart-wrenching story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life.

I think this is not only one of the best books I’ve ever read, but also one of the most important. The writing is lyrical and filled with the type of magic Alice Hoffman is known for. It’s beautiful, haunting and just wonderful. This is not an easy book to read. A novel of Anne Frank’s somewhat imagined life before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis, it’s impossible to not feel foreboding and dread as the events unfold. We know what terrible things happened to Anne and her family and millions of other Jews. I cried many times as I read Anne’s dreams, hopes and aspirations, knowing how many of them would never come true. And yet, with Hoffman’s writing, there is a sense of hope. Hope that there’s still good in the world, despite the many evils faced. Hope that love will triumph over hate. One of my favorite things about this book was seeing Anne as just a young girl with the same feelings most of us young girls have had. I loved seeing her relationships with her mother, father, sister and grandmother. I loved seeing her wrestle with feeling like she was too much and yet not enough. At the end of the day, she was a young girl who lived and died through true horror and yet, she was also just a young girl who wanted to feel special and be loved. Alice Hoffman brought Anne (and all the other characters) to life and amid all the horrible things we know are coming, I still felt hope.
CW: antisemitism, racism, violence, war, animal death, genocide

Thank you to NetGalley and Scholastic Press for an advanced digital reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review.

"Bestselling author Alice Hoffman delivers a stunning novel about one of contemporary history's most acclaimed figures, exploring the little-known details of Anne Frank's life before she went into hiding.

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has captivated and inspired readers for decades. Published posthumously by her bereaved father, Anne's journal, written while she and her family were in hiding during World War II, has become one of the central texts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, as well as a work of literary genius.

With the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family's life is turned inside out, blow by blow, restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

In the midst of impossible danger, Anne, audacious and creative and fearless, discovers who she truly is. With a wisdom far beyond her years, she will become a writer who will go on to change the world as we know it.

Critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman weaves a lyrical and heart-wrenching story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life.

Based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, When We Flew Away is an extraordinary and moving tour de force.

Perfect for Alice Hoffman fans and readers of every age."

I'm glad that the story of Anne Frank is continuing to inspire and that this was done so thoughtfully.

I can’t wait to recommend this book to my middle schoolers. Middle schoolers love historical fiction books about kids their age. This is a great prequel to The Diary of Anne Frank. Such a wonderful look into what the life of Anne Frank might have been like before the diary. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this advanced reader’s copy.