In The Windeby Puzzle, Newbery Award-winning author Lois Lowry gives readers two short stories with archaeology and history lessons interspersed before, between, and after the fiction. The stories are Lowry’s attempt to imagine the life of the Windeby Child, a young teenager whose body was found in the Windeby peat bog in northern Germany in 1952. The body was determined to be that of a girl or a boy about thirteen years of age who lived during the Iron Age, first century A.D.

Since we don’t have all that much information about the lives of the Germanic people of that time, Lowry was able to let her imagination run wild. And the two stories in the book spin a yarn of two possible backstories for the Windeby Child and how he or she managed to die at such a young age in a peat bog. It’s a bit hard to maintain interest and suspense when both you and your readers know how the story ends. In both tales, the main character dies–young. And in both stories the lives of all of the characters are portrayed as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbs).

In the first story, a girl named Estrild is a sort of proto-feminist who resents her female life and longs to avenge her uncle, killed in battle, by becoming a warrior herself. The boy protagonist, Varik, in the second story had to be a victim, too, since he dies at the end, so Lowry made him disabled and suicidal. Maybe first century northern European lives were just this grim and ugly, but I could have done with a bit of romanticism and hope in the story.

Half fiction, half history lesson, this book is at least different from your average middle grade fiction book. It was not my cup of tea, but maybe a youngster interested in archaeology or ancient history or finding things preserved in peat bogs might like it. Be careful, though, if you’re exploring any peat bogs. According to Varick, “If you go too deep in, the bog sucks at your feet.” Yuck!