When I was a child, works such as The Diary of Anne Frank, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and Bette Greene’s Summer of My German Soldier gave me a far more nuanced understanding of World War II than textbooks alone. But with so many titles devoted to this topic, especially lately (a recent Wall Street Journal article speaks to the trend), is there still more to say about the Second World War?

My answer is a resounding yes. I recently revisited Safiyyah’s War by Hiba Noor Khan (Allida/HarperCollins, 2024). Inspired by actual events, the novel—a Kirkus Prize finalist—centers on the Grand Mosque of Paris, which sheltered Jewish people during the Nazi occupation. I was moved by the work—and shocked I hadn’t known about this powerful act of resistance. The war affected millions, and there are countless stories we have yet to hear, especially those involving people of color.

As they so often do, kid lit authors are leading the way. Pearl, a graphic novel by Sherri L. Smith, illustrated by Christine Norrie (Graphix/Scholastic, 2024), follows a teen who travels to Japan to visit her great-grandmother; stranded in the wake of Pearl Harbor, she’s still in Hiroshima years later when the atomic bomb ravages the city. While the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are covered in history curricula, many young people remain woefully uninformed about their impact. (Michigan State University historian Naoko Wake, for instance, notes that before taking her class, most of her students had never seen photos of the aftereffects of the bombs.) A potent counter to U.S.-centric WWII media, Pearl eschews gruesome depictions in favor of searing visual metaphors that nevertheless impart a devastating truth: War is indeed hell.

Daniel Nayeri’s The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story (Levine Querido, August 26) finds two orphans fending for themselves in the mountains of Iran after their father is killed during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of their country. Setting his tale in a neutral nation under the domain of the Allies, Nayeri explores a side of the war rarely seen in children’s literature (or adult, for that matter) as the siblings—seemingly mere pawns at the mercy of forces beyond their control—manage to protect each other, a young Jewish boy they encounter, and a tribe of nomads on their annual migration; this tale demonstrates how even the most vulnerable can make a difference.

With The Sky Was My Blanket: A Young Man’s Journey Across Wartime Europe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 19), the late Uri Shulevitz tells the story of his uncle Yehiel Szulewicz, a Jewish Pole who in 1930 left home at age 15 in search of adventure and found turmoil and upheaval. Bearing witness to the rise of Nazism and the emergence of fascism in Italy and Spain, Yehiel fought authoritarianism every chance he got. This is both a remarkably wide-ranging and cogent view of history and an account of a hero whose acts of courage feel all too relevant today.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.