Some will witness new friends' sudden and unexpected deaths. As the day and the story unfold, some characters will briefly meet and team up to work together. And 13-year-old Monique Marchand unexpectedly finds herself aiding the wounded men on the beach.
An 11-year-old French Algerian girl named Samira Zidante must take a message to Resistance fighters after her mother is captured by the Germans. It's not just soldiers who have important work to do that day. On Omaha, a 20-year-old African American medic named Henry Allen, a member of the only African American unit on the beach, is treating the wounded, one of them the white officer who'd tormented him throughout boot camp. At midday, with the battle still raging, a British tank driver, 19-year-old Private Bill Richards, and his crew head ashore from their transport boat only find they've been taken Omaha Beach instead of the beach where British troops had been ordered to land. In a plane flying above the English Channel, two Canadian paratroopers, 19-year-old James McKay and Samuel Tremblay, a Cree Indian from Quebec, await orders to jump into a sky already filled with enemy gunfire. The invasion of German-occupied France is about to begin. While the publisher recommends the book for kids 8-12, it's best for readers nature enough to deal with the harsh realities of war.ĪLLIES begins before dawn on June 6, 1944, as two American soldiers, 16-year-old Dee Carpenter (a German immigrant) and his best friend, 17-year-old Sid Jacobstein, are boarding one of the boats that will take them and thousands of other Allied soldiers to the beaches of Normandy. Minorities in the novel are labeled with nicknames commonly used in the 1940s ("Yid," "spade," "coon," "boy") that the author makes clear are offensive.
The Nazis force women and children into a church and set it on fire.
Soldiers are blown up by underwater mines, "obliterated" by mortar shells, and cut down by machine guns. The violence builds as the day unfolds and becomes constant, vividly recounted, and sometimes unexpected, as characters that readers have come to know are killed or wounded. The novel interweaves the stories of young soldiers (two American infantrymen, two paratroopers from Canada, an African American medic, and a member of a British tank crew) and two young French girls. This is D-Day, just as the invasion of France by Allied forces fighting against Nazi Germany is about to begin. Parents need to know that Alan Gratz's novel, Allies, takes place from dawn until after nightfall on June 6, 1944.
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