Parents need to know that Anne Frank's diary is a singular, moving look at World War II from a young girl's perspective. The Franks, along with another family, the Van Daans, hide in order to avoid capture during the German occupation of Holland. Aided by friends on the outside, Anne and the others spend two years in the "secret annex": several rooms enclosed in the warehouse of Anne's father's business. While war rages outside, Anne is a normal teen, thinking at least as much about friends, and boyfriends, and how her parents annoy her, as she does about issues of the day. She is a remarkably clever, thoughtful narrator, and her diary is as entertaining as it is a significant historical document.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is required reading for many middle-schoolers, and it will be rightfully upsetting to many of those readers. Though the events within the diary offer only a glimpse of the horrors inflicted on Jewish people by the Nazis, there is a disturbing element of fear throughout. What we as readers know about what happened to Jews outside the world of the book, and what happened to Anne after the book ends, is inescapable in the experience of reading Anne's diary.
Many editions of Anne Frank's diary include an Afterword, explaining the events of World War II and the fate of Anne and the other inmates of the secret annex.
