I enjoyed Bittersweet, Christy Mandin’s 2025 picture book. I also find it useful, and suggest it. I say all of this despite the reading experience being, at times, just what the title suggests: bittersweet.
These qualities come from the complexity of the book’s topic and Mandin’s handling of it. The book’s subtitle is “Based on the True Tale of the Berlin Candy Bombers,” and that should suggest some of this complexity. As the book explains, after World War II, Germany and Berlin were divided and food was scarce throughout. People dreamed of food, and ate things they wouldn’t have dreamed of before the war. (On one page Hilda, the viewpoint character, tries to eat the “black bread fried in candle grease” her mother prepared. Yeah.)
Airlifts were started, sending supplies to West Berlin by plane. One of the pilots shared the gum he had in his pockets with the kids there, and was so moved by their response that he started using his rations to buy sweets for the kids. Other pilots joined, and they dropped packages of candy, supported by handmade parachutes, to the hungry children. The children wrote thank you letters, which exposed the pilot’s actions, first to a newspaper, then to his superior officer–but instead of punishing him, other members of the military joined in. Civilians back in the U.S. donated candy and hankerchiefs (for the parachutes), and candy rained from the skies, promising, as the book says, “a sweeter tomorrow.”
I found this very moving–first the the handling of a city and nation being torn apart, then the material representation of it in the people’s hunger, and then the very personal attempts to make things better.
There are two pages at the end explaining the book’s historical foundations and giving suggestions for further reading.
Good stuff.
