Comparing My Brother Sam is Dead with Number the Stars

Warning:  CONTAINS SPOILERS (sorry!)

For the homework assignment this week, I chose to compare My Brother Sam is Dead by James L. Collier and Christopher Collier with Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.  I have read both of this books for school AND they are both Newbery Winners.  I found a lot of similar things between the two books but here are a few that I want to talk about

1) How the war leads to the demise of the protagonist's siblings
Both Tim (MBSiD) and Annemarie (NtS) lose their older siblings due to the war.  Tim's brother become a Patriot in the American Revoluntionary War and gets shot by a solider.  Where Annemarie's sister is a part of the Dannish Resistance in WWII and is hit while fleeing from the Gestapo.  This has a major impact on each of the protagonist's life because each character had a close bond with their sibling.  However, Annemarie's sibling dies prior to the beginning of the book, so her death is present throughout the novel.  Sam dies at the climax of the novel and his death is felt by Tim in the denouement.

2) Unity within the family
In MBSiD, Tim and his father are on different political sides.  Tim is a radical Patriot and the father is a Loyalist.  This causes Tim to run away from home and join the Army.  This tension plays out throughout the entire plot.  Things are different in NtS where the Johansen family all seem to recoginze the importance in standing up to the Germans.  They shelter Ellen from Nazi forces and help maintain the Rosen's apartment because "that's what neighbors do."  The Johansen family doesn't display the arguements the Meeker family has about the war.

3)  The action of war affects the character and plot
The novels are both about wars, but they way that they are fought in different manners.  The American Colonies are a part of the British Empire and they rebel.  The British "invade" American colonies as more of a "policing" front where they want the unruly colonists to obey again.  This causes Tim to have conflict within himself because he is torn between being a good British citizen and being a free Patriot.  What is different in NtS is that Denmark is not a part of the German nation.  They are purely being invaded so that the Nazi can gain more land.  This is why the Dannish people, like Annemarie and her family, highly resist the Germans.  They are not Germans at all and they do not believe in their policies.  No one in the country wants them to be there so they do everything in their power to fight back.