Dave Dawson at Dunkirk

Seventeen-year-old American Dave Dawson wakes up in Paris on May 10, 1940, expecting birthday celebrations. Instead, he finds his father vanished and German Panzers rolling through Belgium. What began as a European adventure for the wide-eyed teenager suddenly becomes a desperate flight for survival across a continent collapsing into chaos. With nothing but nerve and a newly-made British friend named Freddy Farmer, Dave must navigate bombed roads, evade enemy patrols, and race toward the coast where the greatest evacuation in history is about to unfold. This is wartime adventure stripped to its bones: fast, breathless, and utterly of its moment. Bowen wrote these books for American teens hungry to understand what the war felt like from the ground up, not from newspaper headlines. The result pulses with authentic period energy and the raw excitement of youth thrown into adult peril. If you want to feel what it was like to be young and terrified in a world on fire, this is where to look.