The love matches among the tight circle of friends are notably diverse, involving couples whose various members include some who are part Indian or Persian, those who are gay or straight, and even the formerly undead. The scream of someone in anguished pain.” Eventually Belial does get around to launching his evil scheme to take over London and then the world despite already bleeding from two wounds previously dealt by legendary magic sword Cortana. The angular figures posing stiffly in Curte’s randomly scattered tableaux do little to either raise or turn down the heat of a narrative that runs to lines like: “He was about to crush his lips to Alastair’s…when a scream split the air. With 11 ensemble characters (not counting the odd Greater Demon) to juggle, Clare uses up most of her chunky page count untangling the romantic snarls of the first two volumes-plus chucking in occasional attacks by lesser demons or raving maniac Tatiana Blackthorn to give her demon-slaying Edwardian-era Nephilim something to do besides steamily tonguing one another, lengthily weltering in secret longing and self-loathing, or (at last!) explicitly consummating their ardor. 14 & up)īelial, Prince of Hell, makes his move on London in this trilogy closer. With the events of the Holocaust growing ever more remote with the passage of time, Sax gives modern readers an unrelenting, heart-rending insight into the hell that the Nazis created. Strzelecki’s pen, ink and black-and-white pencil illustrations graphically depict pain and despair as they accompany text printed on stark white or black backgrounds. Misha takes part in the doomed Warsaw Uprising and survives to tell the world of this last act of defiance. In short staccato sentences, he bears witness to the madness, telling it all, from the struggle to stay alive to the corpses in the streets to the beatings and executions. Sax gives voice to the fear and anger, hopelessness and terror through Misha, a fictional young teen who represents those who really lived and died there. Finally, relocations to the concentration camps emptied the ghetto. Then thousands were moved to the overcrowded ghetto, where they died of epidemics and starvation.

Jews were prevented from using public transportation, doing business or attending schools. When the Nazis took Warsaw in 1939, they immediately initiated their separate war against the Jews in an ever-worsening web of destruction. The sights, sounds and smells of the Warsaw ghetto assail readers’ senses in a raw, brutal telling of the unimaginable horror of that time and that place.

We, Two Boys by Aline Sax