Peace Stick by Stephen Johnson

Description

Erfurt, October 1962. Teenager Ingrid Richter’s life involves adventures with the Pioneers, walks in the Steigerwald, the Martini festival in the medieval Altstadt. In a few weeks, she will be gliding across the skating rink with dreams of representing East Germany at the Olympics.
Ingrid’s schoolteacher shatters that peaceful existence.
“We are on the brink of World War III.”
The Soviet Union is secretly building missile sites in Cuba – minutes from the United States. Who will launch the first nuclear missile – Nikita Khrushchev or John Kennedy?
The political folly of angry men threatens Ingrid’s existence. Didn’t they learn any lessons from two world wars and the first atomic bomb? She understands there are no winners in a thermonuclear war.
Emotions sway from despair to hopes of survival. Ingrid wants a future: a career, her own family, a long life.
She enlists the help of her friend, Sylvie Witzenhause. They seek a lucky charm to protect themselves and the world – a peace stick.

Peace Stick was inspired by a real person dealing with a nuclear crisis that resonates to the present day.