Gloria's Gramophone
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Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.
Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.
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Gloria's Gramophone
When an antique gramophone sent as a birthday present to a bored little girl from a relative in Jamaica swallows its recipient and her friend, the victims are delighted. A tedious, wet, English summer vanishes, and the girls find themselves in the vibrant world of 1920s Harlem, where they join a travelling jazz and tap dance troupe, and have the time of their lives 60 odd years before they are born. A first novel, this is a pretty wild story, told in an exuberant, gossipy, highly conversational style. The evocation of a romanticised, lost, black America is vivid and exhilarating, and the twisted skein that links this world to the heroines' present is skilfully woven.
