Ages 8 12.The Fat Glenda books were put out by Archway/Pocket Books, Seabury and Clarion between 19. A revelation about Helga's past and the mystery of what happened to her immediate family members will whet appetites for the novel's completed sequel. This coming-of-age story offers an authentic glimpse of the 1940s American war effort and corresponding sentiments while introducing a realistically flawed heroine whose well-meaning efforts sometimes backfire. Now her problem is getting others to believe Helga's tales and persuading Helga that she is not to blame for what her family suffered. But as Isabel gleans bits of information about Helga's horrific experiences in Germany and in England, where she was delivered as part of the Kindertransport, Isabel's heart gradually softens. Similarly, she resents the arrival of Helga, a beautiful German refugee with 'a swanlike neck, and luminous gray-green eyes,' who ends up living with Isabel's family when Helga's American guardian turns ill. At first, 12-year-old Isabel views the war as an inconvenience, bemoaning new rationing rules and the growing shortages of luxury items.

Published posthumously, Perl's moving WWII novel set in the Bronx traces a Jewish girl's growing awareness of the atrocities occurring overseas. Isabel's War and its completed sequel, Lilli's Quest, were her final works. She died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two. In addition to the beloved Fat Glenda series, Perl twice received American Library Association Notable awards for nonfiction and was a recipient of the Sidney Taylor Award for Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story. Lila Perl, the daughter of Russian immigrants fleeing anti-Semitism, published over sixty volumes of fiction and nonfiction for young readers during her long and distinguished career. Set in the Bronx during World War II, Isabel's War is a beautiful evocation of New York in the 1940s and of a girl's growing awareness of the world around her. She's also a German war refugee, with a past that gives a growing Isabel something more important to think about than boys and her own looks.

Helga is everything Isabel's not-cool, blonde, and vaguely aloof. Things change when Helga, the beautiful niece of her parent's best friends, comes to live with Isabel and her family. In a stunning new novel completed just before her death in 2013, award-winning author Lila Perl introduces us to Isabel Brandt, a French-phrase-dropping twelve-year-old New Yorker who's more interested in boys and bobbing her nose than the distant war across the Pacific-the one her parents keep reminding her to care more about.

Fat Glenda Turns Fourteen by Lila Perl