Rating: 
Summary: A great read!
Review: Summary:
In 1939, when Anita Lobel was five, German soldiers marched into Krakow. Anita's father, the owner of a chocolate factory and a Jew, runs away in the middle of the night. As a child, Anita Lobel spent years hiding from the Nazis and trying to protect her little brother. The two children have to work through assumed identities, a dangerous stay in the Krakow ghetto, hiding in a convent, and much more! They were captured and marched from camp to camp. Finally, in 1945, they were reunited with their parents and they had to learn to live all over again.My thoughts:
This book touches your heart in a way few books do. Told from a child's point of view, using a very child-like voice, the story leaps out of the pages and into your mind. This book is written by an illustrator of beautiful picture books like Potatoes, Potatoes, and On Market Street. The title, No Pretty Pictures, seems to reflect her drawing career. In one example, when she first was allowed to enter school after the war, she was sent to an art class. There, she was given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and a set of new watercolors. She painted a wonderful blue chair, to the delight of her art teacher and the other students. She hasn't stopped painting since. One moral that simply explodes out of this book is to never give up. No matter what life throws at you - starvation, imprisonment, hiding, or whatever - you can persevere. Anita overcame all of the obstacles placed in front of her, either by herself or with the help of others, and has created a spectacular life for herself. If she can succeed despite such odds, so can everybody else. I think children would love to read this book when they are old enough to get all the way through it. At almost 200 pages, it is not a quick book to read. But it is a gripping, page-turning story - one of those kind that you can't put down. I think children will be drawn to the child-like voice of the story, the innocence the author manages to use. Anita Lobel is one of those truly gifted authors that can tell a horrible story about a child, for a child, without sounding condescending or self-pitying.
Rating:
Summary: No Pretty Picture: A Child of War
Review: The book begins with five year old Anita living in her home in Poland. Soon for fear of the Nazi's her family must go into hiding. Anita and her brother are sent to Lapanow with their nanny. The nanny convinces everyone that Anita and her brother, who has to be dressed as a girl in disguise, are her two sick daughters. All is going very well until Anita's mother shows up. For fear of being found out they are on the run again. This time the nanny and children hide in a convent. Later the Nazis come and take the children to a concentration camp. They lived there in horrible conditions until they were saved by the American soliders. This is an excellent book over the Jewish struggle during the Holocaust. I would reccomend this book to anyone with an interest in the Holocaust.
Rating:
Summary: The next best thing to reality
Review: The story of this little girls life is very compelling yet understanding. I have just read Number the Stars, yes that was a good book for beginers of the dreadfull happening. The story is very discritive in a very positive way and puts you like you were third person right behind her as it happend. She does not hold back on her deepest thoughts of rejection,acception,fear,and starvation, But upon the greatest was her love for her brother on the entire way as if they were together for centeries.It almost made me feel as if I had had a brother and the book still makes me yearn for a sibling. This book is to inspire and yet you still have mixed feelings and then still pondering upon why she went this way and that. I love this book I wish she could write the rest of her life and see what happens exactly when she got to the new world.
Rating: 
Summary: Looking at a new life
Review: This book is a great true story for teens to read. It helps give an easy to read explanation of the life of a child in war. As this book starts out a young girl who is Jewish lives in a small village with her family. She has to be hidden away from the Nazi soldiers or she'll have to be taken away from her loved ones. Her father has abandoned the family and left her mother, brother, nanny, and herself to find a way out. Again, I think this book was really great and any one would enjoy reading it.
Rating:
Summary: War Through A Childs Eyes
Review: This book is wonderfuly wrote, when you start to red it you can't put it down. The book is wrote from a small girls point of view. Her and her little brotehr are jewish so they are trying to run away from the Nazis. She goes into great detail so that you have a picture of everything in you mind. By the end of the book you can't even believe what she had went through. This is 100% truely a great book.
Rating:
Summary: BLUE
Review: This book tells about a person's life. She was brave to write this book in my opinion. Some people don't even want to remember there past. She wrote about her childhood during a war. If you like stories that have fact in them this is a good book for you
Rating:
Summary: The author's memoir of growing up during World War 2.
Review: This book was very sad, but it is a book that needs to be read. The author, Anita Lobel, was barely five when the Nazis invaded her home in Poland. As a young Jewish girl, she grew up persecuted. As the Nazis created more regulations, Anita and her little brother went into hiding, posing as the children of their Catholic nanny. Yet they were caught and sent to a concentration camp. All the odds were against them, yet the two children - just ten and eight years old - managed to survive three concentrations camps and a forced march. Anita grew up to illustrate children's books. One would never guess she had such a horrifying childhood - until reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: I really enjoyed this beautifully written book!
Review: This was a really moving, beautiful book. I think in the book, Anita Lobel depicted the opinions and feelings of a child and teenager very realistically. The book is easy to read and a real page-turner. It is written in a very clear, simple style so that the reader is able to sympathise and understand the character's feelings. Anita Lobel is able to write the book in a way that shows that she doesn't pity herself for what happened during the Second World War in Poland. The author never overexaggerates or overemphasizes the situations that she experiences. What really stunned me about her character as a child, was that she confronted every situation very bravely and maturely. As a child, Anita Lobel was thankful for any small improvement in her life during the war.
Rating:
Summary: A Child's View of the Holocaust
Review: When Anita Lobel wrote this memoir, she did not try to write in a sopisticated "literary" style. She didn't try to "doctor" the events with years of hindsight and thinking. Instead, she wrote "No Pretty Pictures" with the clarity and simplicity and paradoxical depth of a child's mind. Anita's story begins in Krakow, Poland, where she is born into a middle class home and the future looks to be filled with ease, pleasure, and a good education. However, the Nazis change all that. With their invasion of the city and eventually, all of Poland, Anita and her brother must flee. At first they manange to escape to the Polish countryside with their nanny, and when that fails, they go to the ghetto with Anita's mother. But the inevitable finally happens, and Anita and her brother find themselves confronted with the ultimate evil...a concentration camp. "No Pretty Pictures" doesn't end there, and goes even further to chronicle the challenges and differences of the war's aftermath. This book is a valuable addition to a Holocaust collection-memoirs really are the best books written about a subject, and Anita's is wonderful. The thing that makes this one stand out from the others is the way experiences are captured with a child's sense of fear and safety, comfort and pain, and good and evil.
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