Her shiny blond hair brushes the black leather of her bomber jacket. 

Her browline glasses say smart but stylish.

Her voice is enthusiastic but precise.

Her grade in school? Sixth.

Aria Storm Partridge goes to Sullivan West Elementary School and she was sitting at her family’s kitchen table with me. A few months earlier I had been in her living room at a book group meeting with her mother and some other friends. Aria had run in to ask if she could tell us about a book she loved.

“And that’s why I think you should read The War That Saved My Life,” she said, finishing up an impassioned review. She ran back upstairs with a friend.

I made a mental note.

A few weeks later I was looking for something to read and remembered Aria’s heartfelt recommendation. Within seconds I borrowed the eBook by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley through the library.

Ada Smith is an immediately captivating narrator. 

She lives on the third floor of a building in London at the beginning of World War II.

She has a clubfoot and can barely stand.

She doesn’t know her age and has never been to school.

But Ada knows more than she lets on to her mother, a woman who is more concerned with what people think of her than the wellbeing of her daughter. “You’re nobbut a disgrace,” she tells Ada.

Painfully teaching herself to walk on a twisted foot, Ada hopes she can change her mother’s mind. But when she hears that children are leaving for the countryside where they can be safe from the war, she comes up with another plan. She and her younger brother Jamie will leave, too. She just won’t tell their mother.

“The author is a very good writer,” Aria says tapping her paperback copy of the book on the kitchen table. “She actually made my foot hurt!” 

It wasn’t the writing or the author, however, that originally made Aria pick the book up. It was a friend at her summer camp who was reading it. “Someone asked her what she was reading and she started telling one person and then we all wanted to listen in. She described it very well and we all just sat around and were like ‘what happened next?” By the end of camp, Aria knew the story but not the details, so when she found a copy in a bookstore, she bought it.

“I couldn’t read more than a few chapters at a time,” she admits. “The author worded it as if you were there,” she explains. “In the beginning of the book, a lot happens. It’s in your face.” Aria shivers, remembering.

I know what she means. At the end of every chapter, Ada stands at the figurative precipice of some life-changing experience. She and her brother get on a train not knowing where they’re going. Nobody wants them when they get there. Susan, the woman who finally takes them in, makes it clear she doesn’t want children. I, too, gave a shiver, and then quickly turned the page to find out what would happen next. 

The driving force of this story is Ada. She may not be fast on her feet (at first) or school taught, but her mind is sharp and her determination is her super power. When she wants something, she works hard to get it. Small spoiler, when she sees a girl on a pony galloping alongside the train, Ada finds a way to be that girl, with the Susan’s help.

What I really appreciated, though, is how human Ada is. The emotional scars from the motherly love she so desperately wants and never receives are often more searing than the physical pain of her misshapen foot.  

This is all set against the war of the title. While Ada and her brother are safer in a small English village than in London where Hitler’s planes are bombing, the war touches them every day, from standing in line for groceries to watching British planes take off and land at an airfield across from Susan’s house. But as life gets harder for most people, Ada begins to heal.

“The book gave me an insight on people’s point of view who weren’t really on either side,” Aria says. “Because they weren’t fighting . . and they weren’t NOT fighting.”

I think about this and realize that Aria is right on target. The book’s characters may not be on the front lines but they are all deeply affected by the war in small and large ways, both bad and good.

But is it the war that saves Ada’s life, or Ada herself?

These girls hope you’ll read the book and decide for yourself.