Dancing with the Enemy — Nicholas Walker

A Children's Novel of 36,000 Words: Written by a bestselling author this enormously gripping novel is set Jersey, during World War Two, when The Channel Islands were occupied by Germany. It is very much based on fact: All the buildings, streets, munitions and army terms are accurate, and all the incidents that take place in the novel are taken from incidents that actually happened during the war. After the first year of occupation the only resistance to the Germans came from the children of the island, indeed at one time the schools had to close because virtually all the teenage boys were locked up in the local prison…this is the basis for the story.
There are four main characters in the story, Rex, Sue, David and Marianne. The first three are old friends, David and Sue are twins and Rex is their leader and Sue has a crush on Rex. Sue is very outspoken while David is a quiet follower of the others. Rex is the driving force, he leads the children of Jersey and is very brave, enjoying dangerous confrontations with the Germans. Marianne is the good girl of the school and very much a loner, she always obeys the teachers and the Germans and Rex finds himself having to act as her protector from the other children when they begin to view her as a traitor.
One night Rex finds out that Marianne is hiding a family of Jews in the hills and brings in the other two to help her. To their astonishment, the girl who spends her nights working in her father's hotel: Dancing With The Enemy, is her own one-woman resistance group, receiving orders from Britain. Sue is wildly jealous of Marianne's growing relationship with Rex but is forced to subdue it when they join forces. Rex's group, who, up till then, had merely crept around painting Victory Vs everywhere, now find themselves involved in a much more dangerous business: Smuggling fugitives, disarming mines and spying.
Marianne saves Sue when she falls into a Gestapo trap, then she and Rex are trapped themselves and Rex saves Marianne's life and in the process learns she is herself a Jewess and has spent some time in a concentration camp. Marianne gradually shows them how to fight the Germans and Rex begins to understand the commitment needed: When he asks her if she sleeps with the Germans, she tells him no but she will if it becomes necessary!
A high-ranking American officer crash lands on the island and the children have to hide him. the Germans take hostages, amongst them Rex and David, and promise to shoot them if the officer is not handed over.
The novel is full of action and emotion, but the story is about the realities of war: The sacrifices that have to be made. But it is not a sad book, it is full of the humour that dangerous situations bring and the accelerated relationships that take place in time of war.
The book ends on an upbeat note, leaving the way clear for a series of follow up novels.