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Lobster Blues

Jacqueline King (2025)

Lobster Blues cover
  • Rating
  • Genre:
    Action and Adventure Historical
  • Age: 10 +

The sequel to the acclaimed A Cake for the Gestapo. It is now winter, 1942, and eighteen months since the Germans invaded the beautiful island of Jersey. For Joe, Spinner, Clem and Ginger, memories of carefree days are fading. They try to lift everyone’s spirits with their band, and they play tricks on the enemy. The local newspaper is controlled by the Germans, there’s no post to England and telephone calls are monitored. Everybody is hungry. 16 year-old Clem is angry. His brother’s been killed in action and his father is unwell. Then he and Joe discover that Russian slave labourers have been brought to Jersey to build bunkers for the German army. These prisoners are beaten, starving and desperate. The gang devise a plan. What if they can help the prisoners? Risking life and limb, they embark on an adventure to help in any way they can. But danger lurks in every corner and will it make it worse? 

 Jacqueline King is a Channel Islander living in Somerset.

Jersey was a happy place before World War Two. Tourists flocked there from Britain and nearby France for the wonderful beaches and pretty countryside full of Jersey cows and flowers. However, in July, 1940, all the Channel Islands were invaded by Hitler’s forces and they were cut off for five years. By 1942, the reality of occupation was biting. Later, islanders were upset to see some prisoners being treated very cruelly. These people, mainly men, were prisoners who had been sent from the Eastern Front of the war and were usually Russians or Slavic people. They worked in awful conditions on the island, with barely any food, shoes or clothes. There are some paving stones in St Helier, Jersey, which are engraved with quotations from some of those prisoners. One reads: ‘No one ever used my name. I was called Number 146. Alexei Konnikov. Slave worker.’ It is this stone that inspired me to write about ‘Sasha,’ the prisoner who features in this book. All the stones send a powerful message: people step on them as they hurry by. It was strictly against the rules to help the Russian slave workers, but many islanders did what they could to relieve their suffering, giving them what food they could and hiding them in their own houses. This was exceedingly dangerous. Writing about such times is never easy, but I hope that in Lobster Blue I have drawn attention to the other islanders who took such huge risks for the sake of the slave workers.

Life Challenges

  • Living in war

Themes

  • Dealing with change
  • Friendship
  • Grief
  • Independence

What's Great?

  • Absorbing Plot Line
  • Book series
  • Fast paced
  • Great characters

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