Karen Bass

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  • Home
  • Books
    • Blood Donor
    • Two Times A Traitor
    • The Hill
    • Uncertain Soldier
    • Graffiti Knight
    • Drummer Girl
    • Summer of Fire
    • Run Like Jager
  • About
  • Awards & Accolades
  • Contact

Uncertain soldier
A conflicted teenaged soldier. A boy caught between two countries. When the world only sees you as German, how can you forge your own identity?

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Seventeen-year-old Erich is a prisoner of war working at a northern Alberta logging camp. Twelve-year-old Max goes to school—reluctantly—in the nearby town. The two would be unlikely friends, except that neither has anyone else to turn to. At the height of World War II, nobody wants to befriend a German.

​It doesn’t matter that Erich was forced into the military by his father, or that Max was proudly born in Canada. They are both easy targets for the locals’ grief and anger against the Nazis. The other prisoners are no more welcoming, distrustful of Erich’s perfect English and his dislike for Nazism. Still, when a series of accidents shake the logging camp, they pressure Erich to question the Canadians and find the saboteur—even if his questions get him into trouble. Caught between angry prisoners and suspicious captors, Erich is afraid to take any action at all. It is only when Max’s schoolyard tormentors cross a dangerous line that Erich realizes that his real loyalties lie not with a regime or a country, but with his friend.


Published by Pajama Press, 2015.
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Available for purchase at:
  • ​Barnes & Noble
  • Amazon.com
  • Amazon.ca
  • Chapters Indigo
  • ​Canadian Independent Bookstores
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Karen Bass is the multi-award-winning author of a number of novels for young adult readers. Her forthcoming novel, Blood Donor, which will be released in August 2021, was named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. Graffiti Knight won the CLA Young Adult Book Award, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People, the R. Ross Annett Award, and the CAA Exporting Alberta Award, among other honours. Uncertain Soldier won the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People and was a finalist for the OLA Forest of Reading Red Maple Award. Karen lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she moved from northwest Alberta. There she was a public library manager for sixteen years before turning to full-time writing.