Pancouver article calls A Storm Unleashed a gripping novel

Thank you to Charlie Smith at Pancouver for such a thoughtful article about my latest Holocaust novel for middle grades, A Storm Unleashed, and my new picture book, Kai and the Golem, in advance of my appearance at the 41st annual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival that runs from February 21 to 26, 2026: 

In A Storm Unleashed, Winnipeg writer Carol Matas wanted to show how dehumanizing language can portend calamitous events. The gripping novel revolves around a 12-year-old girl named Mia living in Berlin from 1933 to 1935. Her father is a Jewish veterinarian and her non-Jewish mother died shortly after Mia was born.

“I felt like I wanted to explore fascism and describe it to young people, almost like an immunization,” Matas tells Pancouver over Zoom from her home in Manitoba. 

“If you can get young people to think about what it means to live in a dictatorship or an autocracy, then maybe they won’t be so keen to go there,” she continues. “Maybe they will also, as they grow older, see the signs when they are developing.”

The novel also addresses antisemitism, a topic that Matas has written about in many other books. In A Storm Unleashed, she writes about how teachers and others in Nazi Germany became so swept up by Hitler’s rhetoric and lies that they embraced these ideas as their own, stigmatizing Jewish children like Mia. 

[Kai and the Golem] features illustrations by Elisa Vavouri and is about a child who thinks an entity is wrecking his day for no good reason. Kai eventually befriends this entity, names him Pete, and is better able to cope as a result.

Read the full article.