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Last year, Tomie dePaola won The Society of Illustrators Lifetime Achievement Award and his extensive interview with Lee Wind on the SCBWI blog reminded me that I still haven't read Tomie's books about his home front experiences during World War II. He wrote about them in the last four of the eight books that make up his 26 Fairmount Avenue series, subtitled The War Years.
This post probably contains spoilers
In Book 5,
Things Will Never Be the Same, begins in January 1941, first-grader Tomie had just received his two best Christmas presents - a Junior Flexible Flyer sled and a diary with a lock and key, and so Book 5 begins with his very first diary entry. With all the charm, honesty and bluntness of a very precocious and artistic 6 year old, Tomie takes us through the year 1941, diary entry by diary entry. Each chapter begins with a short diary entry and the rest of the chapter goes into more depth everything that was going on at the time. And 1941 is an exciting year for Tomie. Through his diary, Tomie presents a wonderful picture of what life was life in that year preceding America's entry into the war. Things he writes about include the day to day family life of the dePaola family, and the world of a first grader, for example, learning about President Roosevelt and the March of Dimes, and not being able to swim in the summer because of a Polio scare; the excitement over seeing Disney's
Fantasia in the theater, his disappointment over who is second grade teacher is, about his tap dancing lessons which he loves, and of course all the holidays over the course of the year. But all this changes on December 7, 1941. Tomie writes in his diary:
As the dePaola's listen, along with the whole country, to the radio announcer talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tomie's mother says to her family, "Things will never be the same."
Unlike
Things Will Never Be the Same, which covers a whole year
, Book 6,
I'm Still Scared, diary entries only cover one month, December 7, 1941 to December 31, 1941, but is is a powerful month for second grader Tomie. Not quite understanding what has happened and the implications of war, Tomie is a scared little boy and to make matters worse, no one really wants to explain what's going on to him. Luckily for him, after listening to Roosevelt's speech on the radio, the family go to visit Tomie's grandparents and his grandfather, Tom, takes some time he talk to him about his fears. But life had indeed changed. At school, there were air raid drills, and at home, an air raid shelter had to be created in the basement just in case. And Tomie had to contend with being called the ENEMY because of his Italian heritage. War was everywhere. Even at the movies showing a children's feature, the newsreels showed London in the Blitz, and Tomie realized it was the first time he had seen what war was like. At the end of December, young Tomie is still scared.
Book 7,
Why?, begins on January 1, 1942 and runs until April 29, 1942. In his new diary, Tomie gives more details of his day to day life. He writes about his excitement about being able to stay up late for New Year's Eve, of going to help in his grandfather's grocery store, and of his first surprise air raid drill at school. But his real trouble comes when his teacher starts teaching the kids to write in cursive and refused to allow Tomie, a lefty, to hold the pen in a way that worked for him. And Tomie talks more about his older brother Buddy and how angry/annoyed Buddy gets with him. But perhaps saddest of all are the entries about his cousin Anthony A/K/A Blackie. Blackie was a favorite cousin who had joined the Army Air Corps. Tomie seemed able to adjust to everything involving the war - like rationing and air raid drills - but the news of Blackie's death is just incomprehensible to him. In the end, he is left asking himself Why?
Book 8,
For the Duration, is the final book in the 26 Fairmount Avenue series and begins on May 1, 1942 and runs through... Well, that's hard to say. It seems that early on, Tomie's diary key disappeared. While there are not more diary entries, Tomie still talks about his life and in 1942, patriotism is in full swing. At school, Tomie gets very sad and runs out of the room when the class starts singing the Army Air Corps anthem. At dancing school. there is a lot so rehearsing for a wonderful recital, but there are also bullies in the schoolyard who take his new tap shoes and start tossing them around. And there are victory gardens and ration books and helping again in his grandfather's grocery. Things between Tomie and his brother Buddy get worse and in the end, it is Buddy who has taken the diary key. But one thing Tomie learns to understand completely is that some things disappear (chewing gum, fireworks) and other thing come into being (war bonds, war stamps), all "for the duration."
The 26 Fairmount Avenue series is an extraordinary group of chapter books recalling Tomie dePaola's early life living in Meridan, Connecticut. For the most part, they are a series of vignettes told in great detail and include whimsical illustrations by Tomie thoughout the books. Much of what Tomie writes is funny, charming, sad and so typical of kids that age. Though I haven't reviewed for first four books here, I would really recommend the whole series to anyone who is a Tomie dePaola fan. My only gripe is that we are left hanging about Buddy and the diary key.
And if you are a Tomie dePaola fan, be sure to read Lee Wind's interview with him:
Part 1 can be found
here
Part 2 can be found
here
Part 3 can be found
here
These books are recommended for readers age 7+
Things Will Never Be the Same was borrowed from the Children's Center of the NYPL
I'm Still Scared was borrowed from the Yorkville Branch of the NYPL
Why? was borrowed from the Morningside Heights Branch of the NYPL
For the Duration was borrowed from the Bank Street College of Education Library
Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by Tammy at
Apples With Many Seeds
It is 1944 and Jayna's big brother Rob, the only family she has, is a cook in the Navy. Jayna and Rob were separated for years, placed in separate foster homes after the automobile deaths of their parents. But when Rob turned 18, he got custody of Jayna. Only now Rob has received his orders to report to his ship for deployment to the war in the Pacific. Rob have made arrangements for Jayna to stay with thier landlady Celine for the time he is away.
Rob may be a great cook, but Jayna has a way with making homemade soup that even he can beat. Could this be a family talent? The night before he leaves, Rob tells Jayna he found a small blue recipe book with a name and an address in Brooklyn.
When a dreaded telegram arrives with news that Rob is missing in action, Jayna decides to find the recipe book. Inside, there is a picture of a woman standing in from of a shop called Gingersnap, the same name her mother used called her, or so Rob claimed. Jayna didn't remember her parents, who were killed in a car accident when she was very young. Unhappy at Celine's and feeling very alone in the world, Jayna packs up a few things, including Theresa, the turtle she takes care of, and set off early one morning to find what she hopes might be an unknown grandmother named Elise.
Accompanying her on the trip to Brooklyn is a ghostly presence, or at least part of one, who wears Jayna's pink nail polish and can read her thoughts. But she wasn't much help when Jayna takes the wrong train and ends up in Coney Island. Leaving Theresa and her suitcase on the boardwalk, she goes down to the water's edge. And naturally, the suitcase with the recipe book is stolen. But Jayna remembers the address and, in distress, take the train to find the store with the name Gingersnap.
Yes, it is exactly where it was supposed to be. And there is a kindly looking elderly lady behind the counter. Mustering up her courage and encouraged by her ghost, Jayna walks into the store and no sooner is she standing in front of the lady when she knocks a wedding cake of the counter.
Ready to give up, Jayna runs out the store's back door and hides in the overgrown garden there, falling asleep. When she wakes up, she is hungry, miserable and stiff. To make matters worse, now Theresa is missing. But, seeing Elise in the back of the store making some dinner, Jayna shores up her courage and knocks on the door.
Will this kind lady be her grandmother? At last, a family member and a tie to her unknown parents?
Maybe, maybe not.
You can't go wrong when you pick up a book by Patricia Reilly Giff to read and
Gingersnap is not exception. The plot may be a little predictable, but the characters are believable and basically kind and caring, which is always nice to see in a novel. WWII was a chaotic time and all kinds of things happened that caused children to become orphans, so it was nice to see Jayna's desire and determination to be part of a family.
I loved reading reading all the little details Giff included in
Gingersnap, and especially about my hometown Brooklyn in the war. The lackadaisical attitudes about school and Elises's difficulties running a bakery with all the shortages due to rationing are the kinds of real life details that go into making good historical fiction.
My very favorite part of the book is Jayna's soup recipes that are scattered throughout. Depending on what is going on in her life, Jayna prepares soups like "Don't Think About it Soup" or "Feel Better Vegetable Soup."
And about that ghost - when you read Gingersnap I think you will agree that this is not really a true blue ghost story and there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for her presence.
This is a great book about food, family, hope and courage, and whether you are or are not a Patricia Reilly Giff fan, one you will want to read.
This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was borrowed from the Webster Branch of the NYPL
About a year ago, I reviewed Allen Say's autobiographical work
Drawing from Memory and the effect World War II had on his life growing up in Yokohama, Japan. Ed Young's
The House Baba Built is also an autobiographical work and describes his life in Shanghai, China during the war.
Ed Young's father was an engineer and realizing that war was coming to China, he decided he needed a safe place for himself, his wife and five children to live in. The safest place would be around the foreign embassies in Shanghai, known as the International Settlement. But land there was expensive and so Baba (an affectionate term for father) made a deal with a landowner - Baba would built a house on his land with the proviso that his family could live in it for 20 years. The family moved into the house in 1935 and for the first few years that they lived in Baba's house, life was good. There was a lovely swimming pool, where friends and family would gather in summer, there was lots of pretend playing, lovely gardens and even a roof that made a great roller skating area. Life wasn't rich in goods, but it was rich in so many other ways.
But when the Japanese invaded Nanking in 1937, Baba had to build an apartment where the kids roller skated because relatives from there had escaped to Shanghai to live. After that, the effects of the war began to be felt more and more. And in 1940 a family who had escaped Hitler's Germany, the Luedeckes, also moved into Baba's house.
The three families living in Baba's house were very fortunate. Even after things changed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the loss of British and American protection, the house that Baba built was able to withstand the war, and even when bombs were being dropped directly on Shanghai, they missed the house completely.
When the 20 years were up, the Young family honored their contract and turned the house over to the landowner. By then, most of the children had grown, married and gone their own way.
It was during the war, living in Baba's house, that Young discovered his talent as an artist. Given crayons and paper to use while recovering from a cold, his first attempt at drawing was a cowboy that didn't quite match what was in his mind. But he sought guidance and the rest is history. For
The House Baba Built, he used a mixed media, which gives it depth and texture. Young's family is shown in an interesting combination of old photographs and drawings, there are all kinds of collages (my favorite art form), and some of the pages fold out to reveal even more of the life of the Young family in Baba's house.
Most of the book consists of vignettes that are put together to resemble the collages, rather than a linear history of Young's early life. However, there is a timeline at the end which can help orient the reader if needed. And there is an extended section at the end of the book of later photographs, including Baba's house, as well as a diagram of the house and some facts regarding how the house was built to bombproof it.
All in all,
The House Baba Built is an interesting book for all kinds of readers, but especially a reader who likes to explore each and every page of an illustrated book. This is a work that proves itself to be an insightful look at some of the early influences on a beloved author/illustrator.
This book is recommended for readers age 8+
This book was borrowed from the Webster Branch of the NYPL
Facts First! Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by
ProseandKahn
Year after year, television offers up a variety of Christmas movies. There are perennial favorites like It's a Wonderful Life with James Stewart and Donna Reed, A Christmas Story, A Christmas Carol, and, of course, Home Alone, just to name a few. These are all fine movies, but my very favorite is an old 1945 black and while film I discovered on television when I was about 12 or 13.
It is called Christmas in Connecticut and is a wonderful, zany romantic comedy. It stars Barbara Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, who writes articles of a woman's magazine, Smart Housekeeping, about life on her Connecticut farm with her husband and baby and includes decorating ideas and menus with recipes for the wonderful meals she prepares for them. In truth, Elizabeth is a single woman living in a Manhattan apartment and couldn't boil water or diaper a baby if her life depended on it.
The love interest is Dennis Morgan who plays Jefferson Jones, a Navy man whose ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat and who spends 18 days in a life raft eating K-rations and dreaming about food and then six weeks in hospital eating mush.
Feeling sorry for Jefferson because he claims he never had a proper home and having finagled an engagement to him, his nurse Mary writes to Alexander Yardley, the owner of
Smart Housekeeping, asking if Jefferson could spend the holidays at the Lane farms to experience a real home. Yardley thinks it's a splendid idea, and that it would even be fun for him to join the festivities.
Luckily, Elizabeth has a friend, John Sloan, with a farm in Connecticut who just happens to want to marry her. Elizabeth, thinking she will be fired when Yardley finds out the truth about who she is, agrees to marry Sloan in exchange for entertaining Jefferson and Yardley for the holidays. Elizabeth, Sloan and Felix, the restaurant owner who provides her with the excellent recipes for the articles, all head to the farm. Conveniently, Sloan's housekeeper watches a baby for a woman working in the nearby munitions factory.
But before the Justice of the Peace can marry Sloan and Elizabeth, Jefferson Jones shows up. Now here is the sticky part - it is love at first sight, Jefferson and Elizabeth are totally smitten with each other. Nut, he believes Elizabeth is a married woman, and Elizabeth believes he is engaged to be married.
From this point on, it is a series of close calls with the judge, changing babies (turns out the housekeeper watches two different babies - a boy and a girl), domestic close calls (the best is when Elizabeth is asked to flip the breakfast flapjacks the way she describes in her articles and it is clear she doesn't know how), shameless flirting and lots of innuendo.
Does love win out? Well, it's a romantic comedy, so you probably can guess the answer to that. But, really, the best part of this movies is the journey.
Barbara Stanwyck was really a great comedic actress, but this wasn't showcased enough in her film career. Certainly, she was as good as Katherine Hepburn, though in a different way. This was the movie that made her one of my favorite actresses. And Dennis Morgan wasn't too bad as the love interest, he is mighty good-looking and has a beautiful tenor voice.
As for the war - well, there is the footage of Jefferson's ship being torpedoed and of him and his friend on the life raft. And Felix, whom Elizabeth introduces as her uncle, actually fled Hungary because of the Nazis. Interestingly, although there are many mentions of the war, including a dance to sell war bonds, there is no such thing as rationing, or shortages of any kind. Ironically, though the film was made during the last year of the war, it was released in theaters three days before J-J day. People loved it.
Elizabeth Lane is often compared to Martha Stewart, but forget that comparison. Elizabeth is totally domestically challenged. However, Elizabeth's magazine feature was modeled on Gladys Taber, who did live on a Connecticut farm, Stillmeadow Farm, and who did write a similar feature in
Ladies Home Journal called Diary of Domesticity. And according to Gladys's granddaughter, copies of
Ladies Home Journal were often included in care packages to soldiers. You can find more about this over at
Hooked on Houses along with some wonderful movie screenshots.
And you can find more on Gladys Taber if head over to
Letters from a Hill Farm. Nan has written about Gladys a number of times.
If you are looking for a nice, relaxing holiday movie amid all the hustle and bustle of shopping, wrapping, decorating, cooking, baking and the million other things need to get done, get a copy of
Christmas in Connecticut, sit back and have a chuckle or two.
This is the trailer that was shown in movie theaters in 1945. Enjoy!
P.S. There is a 1992 updated remake of Christmas in Connecticut with Dyan Cannon and Kris Kristofferson and directed by Arnold Scharzenegger. I avoid it.
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| Original Version |
Back on 2010, I listed
Molly's Surprise along with some other Christmas books that are set during World War II, so I thought I would give it a proper review this year. As you probably already know, the Molly in the title is Molly McIntire, a 9 year old girl living in the Midwest in 1944.
In
Molly's Surprise, the holiday's are approaching, it appears it will be a real austerity Christmas for the McIntires, along with the rest of the country. There will be no real treats because sugar and butter are rationed, no real toys because all metals and paper are going towards the war effort and no Dad, because he is an army doctor and stationed somewhere in England taking care of wounded soldiers.
Molly doesn't mind that their gifts will be practical, she just wants surprises because that is what the McIntires are known for - lots of Christmas surprises. And she is absolutely sure her Dad will be sending them surprise presents from England. She just knows he wouldn't let Christmas go by without any of his wonderful surprises. But then, the always practical Jill, Molly's older sister, reminds her: "This Christmas is different...This is wartime. There just won't be any wonderful surprises this year. We have to be realistic." (pg 7)
But soon, there is one surprise and it isn't good. Her grandparents, who were supposed to bring a Christmas tree from their farm, have to cancel their plans. Their car has a flat tire and rubber has gone the way of everything else for the war effort and they have to wait to get it repaired.
No dad, no grandparents, no tree, no presents - this was not shaping up to be a very Merry Christmas for Molly.
But then more surprises start to happen and they are good. First, Jill announces that she is willing to use her babysitting money to buy a tree. So, Molly and brother Rickey both contribute what they have and the girls go off to find a nice Christmas tree.
Next surprise is a beautiful blanket of snow just in time for a perfect white Christmas. And in that snow is a third surprise. One that Molly and Jill decide to hide until Christmas morning.
Is is possible that in the season of perpetual hope the third surprise could be presents from Dad? Well, maybe and maybe more than just that.
 |
| New Addition |
Molly's Surprise is the second book in the American Girl series of books about Molly. It is a historically correct, historically interesting story. It demonstrates the sacrifices, the forgoing of so many things for the sake of the war effort. Presents and sweets are much easier to give up, but not having a parent home during the holidays is hard for Molly, like it was for most kids who had a parent in the Armed Services in World War II and just as it is for those kids who have a deployed parent today. Molly misses her Dad all the time, but especially at Christmas.
I've always liked the books about the historical figures that are part of the American Girl brand. They do so much towards introducing girls to what it was like to be a girl at a pivotal time in history. The stories are accurate, detailed and interesting enough to hold girls attention and make them want to find out more. Aside from the six books in the Molly series, my Kiddo also read Molly mysteries, and a few other nice short stories that were produced, not just about Molly, but about the other historical dolls as well. The good news is that they are still easy and affordable to find or to simply borrow from the library.
And to insure a high quality to the books, they are all written by excellent authors that you probably already know. In the case of the Molly books
, the author is Valerie Tripp.
Oh, and the books make nice stocking stuffers. I know Santa stuffed an American Girl book more than once in my Kiddo's stocking.
This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was purchased for my Kiddos personal library.
When I was 9 and my sister was 16, I read her diary. I found out all about her life, what she thought and how she felt about a variety to things. I didn't get caught, so I didn't get punished, but I did suffer an overwhelming guilty conscience for a long time. Consequently, I have never committed an indiscretion like that again. Even so, I have to admit that the bare honestly that can be found in a diary still holds a certain fascination for me. Maybe that is why I like reading published diaries so much. At least you don't have to worry about dealing with a guilty conscience.
Naturally I was very excited when I first heard about
Home Front Girl: a Diary of Love, Literature and Growing Up in Wartime America. It is a real diary, begun by Joan Whelan in 1937 at age 14 and runs through to 1943 when she was 20 years old. Joan was the daughter of Swedish immigrants living in Chicago who grew up to become a journalist and adjunct professor of history at the New School for Social Research, so it is not too surprising that she would have kept a diary as a teen. After Joan passed away in 2010, her daughter found her diary among her papers and decided to share it with the rest of the world.
And I am so glad she did because
Home Front Girl did not disappoint me. Throughout her diary, Joan chronicles her thoughts on the ordinary everyday events in her life. Here, then, is a sampling:
School: Tuesday, April 13, 1937 "Hello! Tests next week! Oh, boy! Have pity on me and sympathize."
boys and boys in the R.O.T.C.: Tuesday, April 20, 1937 "...there isn't any R.O.T.C. unit in Greeley [Elementary School] (they do look so handsome in uniforms!)" (pg 3)
first dates: Thursday, January 20, 1938 "Yesterday a boy asked me if I'd go to the dance on Saturday with him. I told him I'd see - I guess I'll go. His name is Jack Latimer. Imagine - my first date." (pg 29)
She also writes about first kisses, singing in the church choir, going to the movies with friends, and the opera with her mom, studying for exams in school and writing a column in the school paper. In short, Joan lives the the busy life of an intelligent, energetic teenage girl in the 1930s.
But Joan also has a very serious side that is evident when she is writing about life and current events. It is then that we really get to see how well rounded this vibrant, thoughtful girl is, and we get a glimpse of the woman she became.
To begin with, even as early as 1937, the idea of war scares her: Friday, December 31, 1937 "..I dreamt a war was begun...I was a boy and I knew I would have to be a soldier. I was afraid to go to war. I kept seeing trenches, and mud, and horror and pain and things - and killing people - and I was terribly scared inside." (pg 23)
her fears about TB: "P.S. I got tested for T.B. at school today...Saturday, June 4, 1938 "I'm susceptible! Tat is , to T.B. If I meet anyone who has it, I might catch it..." (pg 50)
Current events: Tuesday, May 2, 1939 We are on daylight savings now. Germany is giving Poland two weeks to give her the Polish corridor. Otherwise war. However, England and France on side of Poland. So Russia too, maybe...`
But perhaps the most poignant entry of all is the one for Thursday, October 10, 1940, when Joan writes about life for her generation and the impact World War I, the prosperity of the early 1920s and then the depression had on their character development, and on their bodies: "Oh, you, my generation! - we were a lovely lot! Sharp minds - arguing all the time and brittle bodies and even more brittle laughter - and all the time knowing that we were growing up to die." (pg 143)
Joan Whelen's diary is by turns funny, serious, playful, patriotic, optimistic, pessimistic and moving. It is supplemented with lots of her own drawings that are part of the diary, as well as photos and newspaper clippings she saved. It turns out that
Home Front Girl is more than just a diary, it is a document of its time and a very interesting window through which to view this eventful period of era.
In truth,
Home Front Girl: a Diary of Love, Literature and Growing Up in Wartime America was so much better than my sister's diary.
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"Sunday, December 18, 1938, 3:00 It's so wonderful to be the
Virgin Mary and almost 16 and so awfully happy on a cold
bright winter day." (pg 87) |
Be sure to visit the homepage of
Home Front Girl for more information and resources a about Joan and World War II.
This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was sent to my by the publisher
The Fitzosbornes, royal family of that small fictional Channel island Montmaray, are back in this third and last book of the trilogy. As you may recall in
Book I, A Brief History of Montmaray, the FitzOsbornes - Toby, Sophie, Henry (Henrietta), cousin Veronica and half cousin Simon - were forced by the Nazis to leave their island home and head for London.
And in
Book II, The FitzOsbornes in Exile, we found them hobnobbing between London and their Aunt Charlotte's Milford Park estate in Dorset. However, there was war in the air and both Toby and Simon decided to enlist in the RAF.
All the FitzOsborne doings have been relayed to us through the journals of HRH Princess Sophia FitzOsborne and in
Book III, The FitzOsbornes at War, this tradition continues.
Sophie, now 18, begins her journal appropriately enough on September 3, 1939, the day that Britain and France declare war on Germany.
With England now at war, and Toby and Simon in the RAF, Sophie and Veronica both wish to do their bit to help and even manage to convince Aunt Charlotte to let them move into a small apartment behind the larger Montmaray House in London. Veronica, who speaks fluent Spanish, gets a job in the Foreign Office, while Sophie begins working for the Ministry of Food, a job she does not consider very important to the war effort.
And so life goes on under wartime conditions, with air raids, food shortages, and eventually, bombings. All the while, Veronica travels to Spain for long periods of time to translate for high ranking officials and diplomats, and Sophie works and hangs out with friends Julia, who has volunteered to be an ambulance driver, and Kick (Kathleen Kennedy, daughter of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, sister to Jack and Ted), everything faithfully recorded by Sophie in her journal, as the war becomes the new normalcy. Sophie does occasionally still see Rupert, Julia's brother, but he is working on something top secret and doesn't have much free time. Even so, they find they are more and more attracted to each other. But then, Toby goes missing while flying a mission over France, believed to have parachuted out of his burning plane. And it is as if he vanished in thin air, there seems to be no information about him to be found anywhere.
Sophie's wartime journal covers 4 years this time, from September 3, 1939 to November 28, 1944, with one entry dated August 28, 1948. There are, of course, long periods of time elapsing between journal entries, so most are really summaries of what has been happening, which I think works better than lots of more frequent entries, less confusing to the reader.
I wrote in
The FitzOsbornes in Exile that it was more of a historical novel than
A Brief History on Montmaray, and I can honestly say that this third novel is even more historical the both put together. How could it not be? However, Cooper has blended fact and fiction so well, that the divide between them seems almost seamless here, yet the historical information is still quite obvious so that the reader doesn't make the mistake of believing the fictional bits really happened. Clever that. And Cooper has used historical events to help move the story along without overburdening the readers with names and dates and stuff like that.
The main characters are still believable, well-developed and sympathetic. Sophie is no longer the young innocent girl she was when we first met her in 1936, nevertheless, she still retains some of her youthful naivety, even in the face of finding true love. Veronica is still Sophie's opposite, rather more interested in the intellectual side of life than the emotional side. And Henry is still Henry, sweet, charming, always exuberant and optimistic.
Does
The FitzOsbornes at War stand up to it predecessors? Yes, it most certainly does. It is a most worthy sequel to the first two books, though I am not sure it would work very well as a stand alone novel. It doesn't have quite as much wit and fun as before, but there is still enough action, adventure, danger and even love to satisfy, in fact, sometimes there are even some real nail-biting moments. And sadly, there is one spot where you might want to have some tissues handy.
And here's the rub - rather than taking my time and savoring this last FitzOsborne novel, I read it almost in one sitting. I simply couldn't wait to see what was in store for these favorite characters. Then, I got to the end and I asked myself, why did I race through this book that I had been so looking forward to reading and now I have to say good-bye to because I'd finished it and there were no more FitzOsbornes on the horizon? So if you like the FitzOsbornes as I do, try not to rush to the end.
That said, and as much as I enjoyed
The FitzOsbornes at War, I did find two things that bothered me.
1- Henry! I can't say more. The problem with writing about this book is that no matter what you write, it could easily end up as an unintentional spoiler.
2- I did not like the way Toby's homosexuality was handled. It was brought to light in
The FitzOsbornes in Exile, and became a non-thing in this novel. What happened???? It just vanished...
To her credit, Cooper took a page out of JK Rowling's books and included on post-war journal entry wrapping this up for the reader. Not all is a happy ending, but at least you won't wonder.
This book is recommended for readers age 14+
This book was an E-ARC obtained from Random House through
Edelweiss (and it will be available on October 9, 2012 in the US)
The FitzOsbornes at War is a wonderful personal read, but it is also so full of history that teacher's may want to supplement their WW2 classes with it, and if so, you can download an extensive
Teacher's Guide from Random House Australia.
This is book 14 of my Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by
Historical Tapestry
People sometimes ask me what my favorite WWII book is out of all that I have read. It is hard to answer that question because everything I have read so far has at least some redeeming quality of showing how the war impacted the lives of the children (and the occasional adult or animal.)
One of my favorite authors, however, is Robert Westall. Westall wrote my favorite WWII animal story,
Blitzcat, capturing the influence one cat had on the lives of so many while searching war-torn England looking for her true human, after her owner joined the war effort.
Then I read
The Machine Gunners, which I thought wonderful, even if it did have a very unlikable protagonist. And now I bring to this blog another Westall book,
Time of Fire.
Like all his friends, 10 year old Sonny carries his aircraft-recognition book everywhere he goes, so when a German plane drops a bomb on the store where his mother is shopping, killing her, he knows it was a plane they called the Flying Pencil.
In despair, Sonny's father decides to join the RAF to seek revenge on the plane that killed his beloved wife and changed their happy lives forever. Sonny is sent to live with his grandparents in their coastal home near Newcastle. As Sonny settles into life with his grandparents, helping them safeguard their home with sandbags and barbed wire, working in the garden and listening to the wireless together for news of the war, he develops a strong relationship with his Granda, a man who patiently answers Sonny's questions and is always willing to teach him about life. Perhaps the most telling example of that is the way he guides Sonny into slowly and methodically making friends with a war-traumatized dog, whom he eventually wins over and names Blitz.
But Sonny has a guilty conscience. His Mam was in the store buying matches because Sonny had forgotten about them in his rush to buy the newest copy of
Wizard, a magazine for boys. So when his father's attempt at revenge comes to an end when he is shot down, Sonny decides it is now up to him to avenge his mother's death.
But what can a young boy do? In a Robert Westall story, plenty!
Unlike the kitty in
Blitzcat or Chas in
The Machine Gunners, Sonny does not have a strong single- minded focus. But like them, Sonny is eventually faced with a difficult dilemma. When faced with having to choose life or death, will he let revenge control his decision or rise above it?
For that reason, and despite being a World War II novel,
Time of Fire might still resonates for today's readers. Revenge seems to have become such a prevalent way of dealing with the small personal injuries in life today, that watching Sonny's struggle between doing the right thing or getting his revenge for his Mam's death might just help decide a future action on a reader's part (assuming we are what we read, of course).
I have to admit that after reading
The Machine Gunners, I was a little put off Robert Westall's WWII novels, but I am glad I have now returned to them. Sonny is a very appealing main character, making it easier to root for him. And the portrayal of Nana and Granda is superb. I wish they were my grandparents. You can just feel the love in their home. Even the bickering is done with love. This was the same atmosphere in Sonny's home before his mother was killed and his otherwise happy, content father's personality turned black. It makes you realize how fleeting happiness can be.
Like Michelle Magorian (
Goodnight, Mr. Tom and
Back Home, among others novels) Robert Westall is a master at creating a realistic picture of the British home front in World War II. Unlike Magorian, Westall really had experienced the war first hand, growing up in the same area that he sets his stories in, always making them so very rich in details not necessarily commonly known.
This book is recommended for readers aged 9+
This book was borrowed from the Seward Park Branch of the NYPL
Robert Westall as a boy in North Shields, England.
1940 - Twins Jimmy and Patrick Sweeney, 6, have the idea of selling the frogs they have caught to the other kids in their East End, London neighborhood, but as the war continues, evacuation to the country with 3 other of their 11 siblings puts end to their frog enterprise. Unfortunately, when they reach the village they are evacuated to, Jimmy and Patrick are taken by separate families, as are siblings Jeanie, Irene and Bobby. It is Mrs. Cribbins who takes Jimmy and she doesn't seem very nice right from the start.
2012 - Nathan Pepper, 12, isn't too happy about moving from London to a small village in the country because of his dad's new job, especially since it doesn't seem to have a skateboard park anywhere. And it doesn't help that the first night in his new house, Nathan wakes up suddenly, hearing a strange noise. Creeped out, he nevertheless decides to see what it is. Going up the stairs to another bedroom, Nathan can hear distinct crying but even stranger, when he opens the door, the bedroom is completely changed - no longer neat, clean and shiny, now it was a dirty, dusty attic with a little boy under a thin blanket sobbing for his mum.
Jimmy's life with the Cribbins family is much worse than expected. He sleeps in a lonely, dark attic, he does most of the chores in the house, and than he is sent outside, not allowed back in the house til evening. And he isn't fed much either, so now he was starving. Nathan brings him some cake, but when Mrs. Cribbins finds somes crumbs in Jimmy's bed, he is accused of stealing their food and is given no breakfast.
Totally baffled, Nathan continues to go upstairs at night to find Jimmy again, but to no avail.
Meantime, in 2012, Nathan starts at his new school and things begin to look up for him as he makes friends and finds fellow skateboarders; and in 1940, Jimmy begins school, too, but only after doing his chores. And, though the two Cribbins children ride the bus, Jimmy is made to walk the long distance to school. He no sooner arrives and he is picked on by a group of boys resentful of evacuees. While two hold him down, another boy, Frank, takes an industrial staple gun from behind the school and staples Jimmy's back. The only good part of that day is that Jimmy discovers that his twin, Patrick, is at the school, too.
That night, Nathan is able to visit Jimmy again in the upstairs bedroom and once more, he brings the starving, now injured little boy some food.
But can Nathan help Jimmy across the years? In the autumn, he is able to visit Jimmy fairly often, bringing him food and company, but as winter begins, it becomes more difficult. Nathan's concern for Jimmy is really peaked when he sees a picture of the twins boys in a newspaper article about the village's evacuees. And later, in another article, he learns that Jimmy has died from malnutrition. To make matters worse, Nathan's Aunty Miranda comes to stay indefinitely in the upstairs bedroom, and he fears he won't be able to see and help Jimmy before it is too late. So, Nathan decides that desperate times call for desperate measures and he hatches a really stinky plan to drive his Aunty M out of that room and into another. But, can a stinky plan succeed?
Shalini Boland based
A Shirtful of Frogs on the real experiences of her father-in-law, Paul Boland, who was evacuated with his twin Peter at the age of 5. And in writing his story, she has brought attention to this important, yet disturbing and sad aspect of evacuation. Most of us probably think that the people who took in the WWII evacuees from London were such kind, caring, concerned people, sometimes strict but not abusive. But actually that wasn't always the case. Kids like Paul Boland/Jimmy Sweeney were abused, starved and used as free servants while the people they lived with collected the government money meant for their care, and used it for their own family's benefit.
Boland says she created Nathan to give Jimmy a needed friend in this well-written time-slip story, but of course, that doesn't happen in real life.
A Shirtful of Frogs is, in effect, a wonderful tribute to Boland's father-in-law and all the children who suffered the way Paul/Jimmy did when their parents trustingly sent them off to live with strangers in what they believed would be relative safety.
This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was sent to me by the author
Click here to enter a Goodreads Giveaway in progress until October 31, 2012 for a signed copy of
A Shirtful of Frogs open to US, CA and GB residents.
This trailer for
A Shirtful of Frogs is interesting both for the book's promotion and for its use of public domain actual footage:
More than anything else in the world, Ida Mae Jones, 18, wants to fly, but she can't. Not because she doesn't know how, oh no, Ida Mae knows how to fly. Her father had taught her how to fly his crop dusting plande long ago. She can't fly because she doesn't have a license and even though she did everything correctly during her flying test, the instructor refused to pass her on principle - she was a woman. But then the US enters World War II and for Ida Mae there will be no more flying even without a license with gas rationing.
But a new flying possibility opens up in 1943, when her younger brother Abel brings home an ad for female pilots in the new WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilots) program headed up by Jackie Cochran. Ida Mae gets very excited until she realizes two obstacles to joining the WASP program - she still doesn't have a license and she is black and the program was only open to white women.
Ida Mae was pretty determined, though. For one thing, she was so fair that she could pass for white, though she had always chosen not to because it meant cutting herself off from friends and family completely. As for her license, well, Ida Mae was lucky enough to be named after her father, Iden Mahé, so it was a simple matter of changing the name on his license and replacing his photo with one of her own.
And it worked - Ida Mae Jones was accepted into the WASP program in Sweetwater, Texas much to the chagrin of her mother at first. But Ida Mae travels to Texas and begins her training. And she discovers that passing is harder work than learning to fly all those big planes needed for war. She also makes two close friends, Lily and Patsy, who never suspect anything about Ida Mae other than what she presents herself as and with whom she has lots of adventures and lots of fun while becoming a WASP (was irony in that sentence.) But unfortunately passing also means that people talk freely in her presence and that includes their attitudes towards blacks. And there is the intimation of a little romance with one of the pilots.
Much of the book focuses on Ida Mae's training and life in the WASP, but Smith gives the reader enough time with her family and friends from home to make us very sympathetic to what they must have felt when Ida Mae chose to turn her back on them in order to fly. And by the same token, we really are made to understand what her choice cost Ida Mae herself. And in the end we hare left asking the question if you deny who you truly, are can you be truly happy? It is for the reader to decide after reading
Flygirl.
Passing is not a very common theme in YA literature. And in her Author's Notes, Smith writes that it is not known how many women in the WASPs may have passed for white in order to fly the way Ida Mae did. There were certainly black woman like Bessie Coleman who were passionate about flying, but not many would be fair enough to pass and perhaps ever fewer would want to. My heart went out to Ida Mae, she was such a sweet, likable character, but she clearly didn't realize what she was giving up. Any my heart went out to her family and her best friend and supporter Jolene and what they lost with Ida Mae's decision.
Smith has written a story that will give the reader plenty of food for thought about what identity really is and can you successfully and satisfyingly alter who your are. And as far as the WASP is concerned, she has done her job and carefully researched it so that
Flygirl is an
It is 2002 and Georgie Wetherall loves two things - knowing all about England in World War II and creeping. Creeping? That is when you “streak across a row of back gardens, over fences, through hedges, across veg patches...without getting caught or recognized.” (pg13) And he especially likes leaving Miss Coverley’s garden is shambles. Georgie knows she doesn’t like him - she's always watching him. So when he has to repair her fence post as punishment for his last creeping adventure, Georgie discoveres she watches him - it seems he reminds her of someone, but who?
All this is forgotten, however, when Georgie’s class goes on a trip to Eden Camp, a former POW camp turned into a WW 2 museum of 29 huts each dedicated to one aspect of the war. Hut 5 is a realistic replica of a bombed street in London during the Blitz. The sounds and smells add to the realistic atmosphere - but wait, it is perhaps a little too realistic. In fact, Georgie suddenly finds himself transported back to wartime London.
Finding himself faced with the real deal, cold, hungry, lost and scared, Georgie wanders around until he finds a friendly searchlight crew who give him something to eat. After living through a night of bombing in a public shelter, Georgie notices four kids emerging from a bombed out pub. He and the kids starting talking and they tell him he can stay with them as long as Ma approves. Ma turns out to be a 14 year old girl who watches over orphaned kids in the pub’s basement.
Ma has a job in a second hand shop owned by what she believes to be is a Jewish refugee from Germany called Rags. But when Georgie discovers a radio transmitter locked in one of the shops upstairs rooms, they begin to suspect that maybe Rags isn’t who they think he is. And they decide to find out exactly what he is up to with that radio transmitter. Trouble is, Rags begins to suspec
For a short time between December 2,1938 and September 1, 1939, trainloads of Jewish children under the age of 17 were sent from Germany to Great Britain for safety. Altogether, almost 10,000 children and teens made the trip. My Family for the War is a novel about how the Kindertransport changed the life of one child.
Frnaziska Mangold,10, thought of herself as a Protestant girl living a comfortable life in Berlin. Her family, originally Jewish, had converted generations ago, and though she considered herself to be Christian, now the Nazis don’t. Marked as a Jew, life has become precarious for her and her best friend Bekka Liebich. They have even mapped out as many hiding places as they could find in their Berlin neighborhood, just in case they needed to escape from some Nazi bullies.
When a sponsorship to come to America fell through for the Liebich family, Bekka is registered for the Kindertransport, and at the last minute, so is Ziska. But only Ziska is chosen. Just before she leaves for Britain, her mother gives her the cross she had received years ago at her confirmation to remember her by. Ziska promises never to take it off until they are together again.
It takes a while in Britain before Ziska finally finds a place in a family. The Shepards, Matthew, Amanda and the teenage son Gary are orthodox Jews, so when Amanda sees Ziska’s cross, she doesn’t really want her to stay with them. But it is Gary who decides he wants her as a sister, and Anglicizes her name to Frances.
5 Comments on My Family for the War by Anne C. Voorhoeve, last added: 3/8/2012
The Berlin Boxing Club is an historical fiction novel about a young secular Jewish teen coming of age in Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1939. Karl Stern has never considered himself a Jew and his Aryan looks have always helped him get away with that. But not anymore.
After receiving a vicious beating by some former friends turned Hitler Youth bullies, Karl has the good fortune to meet boxing champion Max Schmeling, who knows immediately that he had been beaten up. He offers to give Karl boxing lessons at his club in exchange for a Georg Grosz portrait of himself which Karl’s art dealer father owns. Though the Stern’s desperately need money not boxing lessons, Karl’s father reluctantly agrees to the deal.
While Karl becomes more and more proficient at boxing, life at home becomes more and more difficult. His father is always angry and critical of Karl, his younger sister is unhappy and afraid and his mother is severely depressed and distant. To make matters worse, he has started a relationship with an Aryan girl in his apartment building, something expressly forbidden in Nazi Germany.
And things just get worse. His father’s art gallery is forced to close, and the family must live on the little money earned from his private printing business, which includes making flyers for parties given by a drag queen named The Countess. Eventually, the Sterns are evicted from their apartment for being Jews and forced to live in the closed art galley.
Karl’s one saving grace is boxing, but when he is outed at a German Youth Tournament in 1937 and barred from competing, he not longer can use boxing as an escape, and stops going to The Berlin
*****Spoiler Alert*****
Caleb’s War is a home front coming of age historical novel set in rural
Georgia during the spring and summer of 1944. The main protagonist is Caleb Brown, 15, an intelligent, but angry, frustrated young African American man, and not without cause.
Things at home are sometimes not much better. Caleb and his father often fight and his father believes his is teaching his son to behave by beating him with a leather strap on bare skin. When his father whips him for fighting with some white boys, Caleb decides he can’t work with his father learning carpentry for the summer and ends up washing dishes at Dixie Belle Café, a restaurant he can’t eat at because it is for whites only.
Meanwhile, the town has received some German POWs to help in the fields since so many men are away at war and one, Andreas, is a trained chef and brought to work at the café. Andreas and Caleb become friends; they are, after all, both considered to be pariahs by the white townspeople. Or is this really true for both of them?
Dudley does an excellent job capturing the attitudes of white people towards African Americans ranging from condescending benevolence (the owner of the Dixie Belle Café) to unadulterated hatred (the Hill brothers.) The feeling of fear, uncertainty and anger that African Americans lived with on a daily basis is palpable, and I read many passages with anxiety, thoughts of incidents of lynching, cross burnings, fatal beatings in the back of my mind. Yet, Dudley manages to find a way of getting things across without being so graphic that a young reader would put it down.
Dudley also creates some interesting parallels without sounding forced. For example, while his beloved older brother Randall is off in Europe fighting to defend not only his own country’s freedom, but also free others oppressed by Nazism, Caleb is denied many of the basic freedoms other Americans enjoy. And around the same time that Randall is taken prisoner by the Germans, the previously hated, ostracized POWs, including Caleb’s friend Andreas, are allowed to eat in the Dixie Belle Café.
I started Caleb’s War with a great deal of enthusiasm, which remained right up until the last third of the story. At the beginning of the story, Caleb and his friends are baptized, and while he is underwater, Caleb hears a voice saying “Behold my servant.” He hears this voice more than once, eventually thinking it is the voice of God. When he witnesses the pain caused by deformed, rheumatic hands that Uncle Hiram, an elderly black man also working at the café, suffers from, Caleb offers to pray for him. Well, the next day, Uncle Hiram’s hands are straight and painless.
I thought about this element of the story a lot after I finished reading Caleb’s War.&
In this slender volume, Ann Stalcup shares her memories of living through the Second World War as a young girl in Lydney, England, along the Severn River and close enough to Bristol to remember seeing the fires that resulted from a revenge bombing by the Germans.
Stalcup’s earliest recollections was of people digging trenches and being afraid of her government issued gas mask at the age of 3 in 1938, when as all of England was preparing for war. Then, Ann's father joined the Air Raid Patrol (ARP) in their village, and her grandparents in Birmingham built an Anderson Shelter in their backyard in Birmingham. A year later England was at war with Germany, but all those preparations didn't prepare Ann for war.
Stalcup achieves a nice balance in this book, giving historical events from a more personalized point of view. One very interesting example is the rescue of troops at Dunkirk. Ann and all the people of Lydney felt part of that rescue when they discovered that one of the small ships had once been the pride and joy of a local man. He had to sell it, but the buyer wrote and told him that his form boat would be making the trip across the English Channel.
Other memories goes are about life within her home. Immediately after the war began, the Stalcups had two 11 year old evacuees from London, along with so many other evacuated kids that the schools couldn't accommodate them, so they had to resort to split sessions: mornings the Lydney students, afternoons the evacuees. Soon, two more evacuees joined them, but they returned home when the expected German attacks on England never happened that first year of war.
Despite rationing, the author remembers how her mother was able to give her a 5th birthday party in 1940, though when her mother explained to one little girl that the centerpiece was not a real cake, the girl burst into tears of disappointment. But Stalcup had her own disappointment, recalling that Queen Wilhelmina of Holland
9 Comments on On the Home Front: Growing up in Wartime England by Ann Stalcup, last added: 12/9/2011
This is the final week of the German Literature Month challenge and participants can read whatever they like. I decided to read a novel by Gudrun Pausewang because I found the last book I read by her, Traitor, to be such a well developed taut story that I was on the edge of my seat right up to the end. What an excellent writer she is, though not everyone’s cup of tea.
Dark Hours begins just at the end of World War II and the Russian Army is advancing west rather quickly. Germans living in Silesia (now Poland) are ordered to evacuate and Gisel, 15 (but about to be 16 in two days), along with her granny, her pregnant mother and her brothers, Erwin, 12, Harold, 6, and Rolfi, 18 months, board a train hoping to travel to Dresden and safety before the Russians catch up to them.
Along the way, Gisel’s mother goes into labor and has to be taken off the train. The family continues on, but must change trains along the way. At the station, Granny goes to find out which train to take, while Gisel watches the luggage and the kids. Suddenly, an air raid siren goes off and the children are carried along with the panicking crowd to find shelter. Then Erwin gets separated from them. Gisel leaves Harold alone with the food bag and tells him not to move, but once she finds Erwin, Harold has disappeared, along with their food. And in the meantime, a 7 year old girl named Lotte attaches herself to Gisel.
Air raid wardens insist they find shelter. Once the raid is over, all the kids want to go to the bathroom, and they head that way. Turns out, Harold was in there all the time, with the bag of food he had to rescue from a thief. Finally, together again in the now empty ladies room, the air raid sirens go off again. This time the train station takes a direct hit, and the kids can hear that the shelter has been destroyed, but the rubble is blocking the ladies room exit and they are stuck there with no lights, no water and no heat.
Then they discover that there is a severely wounded soldier in the men's room next to them, whom they can speak with through a small pipe. This man, Herr Rockel, is able to give Gisel advice on how to survive until they are found and seems to draw some comfort in hearing the noise they make.
Buried under mounts of rubble, knowing that they are literally surrounded by death, they don’t know if they will ever be found, but must carry on with that hope. How they do that makes up the bulk of the story, although the reader knows from the start that at least Gisel survives, since the story is framed by a letter she is writing to her granddaughter for her 16th birthday.
Dark Hours is a poignant, compelling coming of age novel, as well as a taut, psychological story, though I didn’t find it as much of a nail-biter as I did Traitor. Interestingly, it almost seems that although Gisel is confined to a small space in which her movements are limited, her thoughts are suddenly free to go wherever they want, not something that was allowed in Hitler's Ger
In Eddie’s War, Carol Fisher Saller explores the impact of World War II on a young boy living on a small farm in Ellisville, Illinois. It is written as a series of dated vignettes, in verse, beginning in January 1934 and ending in November 1944.
Eddie Carl is the younger son of Wynton and May Carl. In January 1934, Eddie is left at the library by his older brother Thomas, while he is at the barber shop. Eddie sees a man reading the newspaper and when the librarian asks if she can help him, Eddie asks for a newspaper, too.
Over time, Eddie continues to read the paper in the library sitting across from the same man and learning about the events that will lead up to World War II. In 1938 the man, Jozef Mirga, finally speaks to Eddie, asking him to help him read the paper to find news of his home in Poland, now that the Nazis were a threat to him family, who happened to be Gypsies.
Slowly the vignettes reveal how the people around him impact Eddie’s life, influencing the kind of person he will become as he grows up. He learns a lesson in kindness when his brother is told to kill the growing baby foxes that he and Eddie had rescued, including Eddie’s favorite, Bitsy. He witnesses how Thomas’s friend Gabe does what he can do to help friend Curtis Ray after he fell out of a tree, a foreshadowing of later his heroics. He learns why his wise father refuses to give into Eddie’s begging for a gun before he is 12. And about Eddie’s long term crush on Sarah Mulberry, starting at a young age, a wise choice given her own compassionate nature.
But hardest of all things is when his brother Thomas enlists after the US enters the war. Eddie idolizes Thomas and worry about him, but at the same time he is proud of his brother piloting bombers over in Europe And his disappointment when Thomas comes home and doesn’t want to talk about the war and his experiences. Eddie, like most kids too young to fight, has romanticized the idea of being in a war and wants Thomas to confirm his ideas. But, as with all wars, reality comes along and it is very different for Eddie.
Eddie’s War is a not to be missed story that is a poignant coming of age look into the world of one young boy during the war. Saller based it on a diary that her father had begun as a 12 year old boy in 1944, but she says that Eddie is NOT her father, but some of the things that her dad wrote did make their way into the book as ideas.
I liked Eddie’s War a great deal, partly because over time I have done quite a bit of research on home front life in the United States, both in the city and the country and I found this to be a very realistic picture of what it was like. And in the middle of all that is a young boy, trying to understand right from wrong, and understanding the courage it sometimes takes to do the right thing.
Carrie’s War is a coming of age story with a twist. While visiting the small Welsh mining town where she was billeted during World War II, Carrie Willow, a 42 year old widow with four children, tells them the story of her evacuation. At the start of the war, Carrie, then 11 and her younger brother Nick, 9, were put on a train along with so many other school children, to escape the anticipated bombing of London by the Germans.
In Wales, they end up living with a bullying, miserly shopkeeper, Mr. Evans, and his weak, oppressed younger sister, whom they are told to call Auntie Lou, eventually adjusting to life in this strained household.
Some months after arriving at the Evans home, Carrie and Nick are sent to fetch a Christmas goose at Druid’s Bottom, home of Mr. Evans other sister, Dilys Gotobed. Arriving at Druid’s Bottom, they discover that Albert Sandwich, a boy they met on the train to Wales, is living there, along with the seemingly magical housekeeper Hepzibah Green and Johnny Gotobed who has cerebral palsy. That night, Hepzibah tells them a story about a slave boy who was brought there and died within a year. Before he died, he cursed the house, saying that if his skull is ever removed from the house, some disaster would occur. Carrie half believed this story, even though Albert discredits it.
Happy and comfortable at Druid’s Bottom, Carrie and Nick spend as much time there as possible, entertained by Hepzibah’s stories, sated by her good and plentiful food and comforted by her warmth,. It is the polar opposite of life with Mr. Evans.
But everything changes when Mrs. Gotobed dies and Mr. Evans inherits everything, including Druid’s Bottom. Hepzibah and Mr. Johnny are told they have a month to make other arrangements for themselves. When Albert claims that Mrs. Gotobed said she had a will which took care of them, Carrie fears Mr. Evans may have taken it, and out of selfishness, denies it ever existed. In the middle of all of this, Carrie’s mother writes that she now wants the children to come live with her in Glasgow.
Bawden is spot on depicting the internal preadolescent emotional life of her character, giving the title of this story its irony. Carrie is a bundle of mixed emotions and conflicting feelings at war with each other, coupled with an overactive imagination. She has an overwhelming need to please the people around her, but also has feelings of anxiety about not being good enough. She experiences feelings of jealousy and hostility at her brother for his ability to get what he wants from people one minute and the next minute, she feels lovingly responsible and protective of him. And like most children, Carrie doesn’t completely understand the circumstances surrounding the adults in her world. This not understanding is what leads Carrie to commit the act that will arrest her “coming of age” and result a lifetime of living with guilt, prompting her to return to Druid’s Bottom with her own children 30 years later.
Carrie’s War is perhaps the most well-known book in Nina Bawden’s vast oeuvre. Just a little older than her main character, Bawden was evacuated from London to Wales at 14 in 1939, but returned to London in 1942. I am sure that Bawden’s experiences are what make
Carrie’s War such a compelling story – as they say write what you know.
Carrie's War was written in 1973, but still resonates in today’s world, making it de
It is the last winter of World War 2 and the people in Holland are cold and hungry. Their country has been devastated by the occupying German forces. For Michiel Van Beusekom, the war is about to get much more dangerous, and now, at 15, he feels ready to actively work against the Germans.
And it looks liked his chance quickly arrives in the form of his neighbor and friend Dirk Knopper. Michiel knows Dirk is in the Dutch Resistance, and Dirk knows he can trust Michiel. On evening, Dirk tells him there is going to be a raid on a distribution center in order to obtain ration cards and identify papers for people in hiding. He give Michiel a letter and tells him to make sure he give it to another Bertus Van Gelder, another friend and resistance member, if anything goes wrong.
And everything does go wrong. Dirk is arrested with his two companions, as is Bertus Van Gelder. Puzzled at how the Gestapo knew what was going on and who was involved, Michiel doesn’t know what to do with the letter. He finally decides reads the letter himself. Inside are instructions for finding a hiding place in the woods, in which Dirk has hidden an injured British pilot named Jack.
Michiel finds the hideout and Jack, and promises to bring him food every other day. But Jack’s injuries are not healing well, so Michiel is forced to let his older sister Erica, a nurse, in on his secret. He didn’t want to expose Erica to any danger, especially since so many things were going wrong lately.
Meanwhile, when the body of a dead German soldier is discovered, it is assumed by the Gestapo that he was killed by one of the Dutch residents of the village of Vlank. They demand that the person come forward and confess, but when that doesn’t happen, they change tactics. They round up a group of 10 random people, including Michiel’s father, the Mayor of Vlank, and announce that they would be publicly hung if the culprit didn’t come forward. When there was still no confession of guilt from anyone, five people are released, but five are shot to death, including Michiel’s father.
While
Winter in Wartime is essentially a coming of age story, it is also a suspenseful and tense story that realistically depicts the dangers many people in Nazi occupied countries faced. Although Michiel willingly takes of the resistance activities of a grown man, he does have his moments of question. For example, his plan for sneaking an elderly Jewish man and his son past the Germans guarding a river crossing works brilliantly, until innocent victims are made to pay the price. And yet what becomes clear in this story is also the willingness of people to risk their lives to help those who are even more oppressed and despised, no matter what.
The book was originally published in Dutch in 1972, and issued in translation in 1976. In 2008, an apparently not very good movie (I haven’t seen it yet) was made, also in Dutch, with English subtitles. And in early 2011, the novel
Winter in Wartime was re-released. Oddly enough, I cannot find the translators name. The translation is a little awkward and a little abrupt at times, but it certainly does not diminish the quality and impact of this book.
The author, Jan Terkouw, was born in 1931, son of a clergyman. I am sure that many of his experiences in the war are included in
Winter in Wartime. The vivid impressive portrayal of the cold, bleak winter weather, the constant stream of people wandering the roads in search of food to bring back to their chi
Ghosts in the Fog is the story of the Japanese invasion of the two of the Aleutian Islands, Attu and Kiska. The Japanese occupied these islands from June 3, 1942 to August 24, 1943. And, I have to be honest and confess that I did not know anything about this invasion of the Aleutians, and by extension the US, since these islands were US territory at the time, so I was really looking forward to reading Seiple's account of it and I was not disappointed.
Seiple begins the history of the Aleutian invasion by introducing the team of US Navy cryptographers who deciphered the messages from Admiral Yamamoto, commander of Japan’s Imperial Fleet, detailing his plan to simultaneously attack the Aleutian and Midway Islands, thereby opening the way for complete Japanese dominance in the Pacific. Unfortunately, Rear Admiral Robert Theobald of the US Navy decided Yamamoto’s messages were a trick and ignored them. Instead, he planned his counterattack 1,000 miles away from the Aleutians. This was a deadly decision for the residents who lived on the Aleutians.
On June 3, 1942, the Japanese began their attack at Dutch Harbor, the home of the Naval Operating Base and Fort Mears Military Base. Not finding what they wanted there, they moved on to the island of Kiska, invading it on June 6, 1942. The only occupants of the island at the time were a weather team of 10 men. Their job was top secret, since weather plays such a crucial role in war, often determining when an attack on the enemy would take place.
On June 7th, they invaded the island of Attu, rounding up the residents, all 44 of them, and forcing them all into the schoolhouse. Not allowed to speak to each other, they were given a sheet of rules of occupation. After being held all day with nothing to eat, the Attuans were allowed to return to their now looted and shot up homes. Attuans were held prisoners in their homes until September, when they were sent to labor camps in Japan.
It took 15 months for the United States military to regain the islands of Kiska and Attu.
Ghosts in the Fog is a nice, comprehensive accounting of the Aleutian invasion. Seiple has clearly researched her topic thoroughly and utilizes it well. Included in the book are lots of photos and a map to help the reader situate where things happened, important since not many people know about this event of World War II.
I found the book informative, but I also found myself looking up things that were not made clear enough in the book. Each chapter starts of focused on an individual who was there, giving it a more personal touch. All their experiences are then pulled together in the final chapter, leaving no loose ends. Most salient in Seiple’s descriptions, and not very different from each other in their levels of harshness, are the somewhat graphically presented cruelty of the Japanese soldiers and the very graphic depiction of Aleutian weather. And much of this story is about surviving these two enemies.
On the whole, I found this to be a compelling book, in part because of the personal stories, and would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in non-fiction works about the Second World War.
This book is recommended for readers age 14 and up.
This book is an ARC that was sent to me by the publisher.
The National Park Service has a website dedicated to the
Aleutian Islands in World War II To read an except from Ghosts in the Fog, vi
I haven’t read this small novel since I was in the 10th grade, so it was interesting to reread it now, with oh so many more years of experience behind me, much like the narrator, Gene Forrester.
Gene has returned to his private prep school, The Devon School, 15 years after graduation and begins to recall his friendship with his roommate, Finny, beginning in the summer of 1942. On the surface, they present a facade of being best friends, getting along so well, no one would suspect anything could ever be wrong. Yet, they couldn’t have been more different. Gene is quiet, serious, intellectual, and not terribly athletic. Finny is boisterous, impulsive, not a good student, but a great athlete. Finny believes that people are innately good; Gene believes people have ulterior motives. That summer, their differences cause cracks in their facade of friendship.
At school for an unprecedented summer term, due to the war, all school rules seem to fall by the wayside. One afternoon, after jumping out of a tree into the Devon River, Finny pushes the unwilling Gene into doing it also. The jumping becomes a ritual of the summer for Finny, Gene and a few other friends. But when Finny forms the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session with nightly mandatory meetings, Gene begins to suspect that Finny’s motives are to take him away from his studies and he begins to resent his roommate.
Gene and Finny continue in this pattern behavior, with Finny proving his athletic ability and pulling Gene away from his studies, and Gene always giving in to Finny's demands and resenting it. Even after Gene explains that he is aiming to be the best student of their year, Finny still manages to persuade him to come to the river for the ritual jump. This time, though, Finny wants them to jump together. Out on the tree limb, Gene bounces it ever so slightly, but enough to cause Finny to fall and shatter his leg on the river bank.
Gene’s feelings of guilt cause him to confess to Finny that the fall was his fault, but Finny refuses to believe him. It is only later that Finny does become convinced of Gene’s culpability and the idea that this is so proves to be too much for him.
The underlying theme of war is present throughout this novel, but the main theme is the idea of a separate peace, a peace that is made separate and apart from the world at large. Devon provides it by keeping the war at bay, out of the lives of the students, despite on campus training of senior for combat. Finny’s separate peace is the state of denial he lives in, refusing to admit that the world can be full of hostility. Gene’s is more complicated, but he too makes a separate peace. The question is with whom- Finny or himself?
Knowles wrote
A Separate Peace in 1959 and it didn’t take long for it to find its way on to high school and college reading lists. It is, after all, a classic coming of age story that stills stands up in today’s world. But it is also a challenged novel. In 1980, the Vernon-Verona-Sherill, NY School District deemed it a "filthy, trashy sex novel." In 1985, the Fannett-Metal High School in Shippensburg, PA challenged it because of its allegedly offensive language. In 1989, the Shelby County, TN school system thought it was inappropriate for high school reading lists because the novel contains "offensive language." In 1991,
A Separate Peace was challenged, but retained in the Champaign, IL high school English classes despite claims that “unsuitable language” makes it inappropr
It is Banned Books Week and I thought I would start things off with a look at
The Book Thief. This is not because it is a banned book, quite the contrary, it has been on the New York Times Best Seller Children’s Paperback List for 209 weeks now, often bouncing in and out of 1st place(See Below.) I begin with
The Book Thief because it is about a young girl who loves books but living in a country and at a time when books were not only banned but they were also burned.
In this story narrated by Death, 9 year old Liesel Meminger is traveling to Molching, a fictional town near Munich, with her mother and 8 year old brother. The children are going to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. On the way, Liesel’s brother dies and at his graveside, she steals her first book,
The Grave Digger’s Handbook.
Liesel doesn’t adjust to her new home very quickly, and she is haunted by nightmares about her brother. Hans Hubermann, a kind painter/accordion player, sits up with her after the nightmares and eventually begins to teach Liesel how to read. She also makes friends with the neighborhood kids, especially Rudy Steiner, who is quite in love with her.
Liesel eventually adjusts to life in Moching, attending school, and helping Rosa Hubermann pick up and deliver the washing she does for wealthy customers. Unfortunately, she continues to experience nightmares, but her reading also improves with the help of Hans.
At a fire fueled mainly by books to honor the Hitler’s birthday, Liesel realizes for the first time that she is in foster care because her parents were communists. And it is from the bonfire that Liesel steals her second book, The Shoulder Shrug. But this time she is recognized by the mayor’s wife, Ilsa Hermann, one of Rosa Hubermann’s customers. The theft results in an invitation come over to the mayor’s home and read in his vast collection of books. This library is the scene of Liesel’s third act of book thievery, carried out in anger after the mayor claims they should no long have their washing and ironing done by Rosa when so many other people are suffering.
As Jews are being sent to concentration camps in greater and greater numbers, Hans agrees to hide 24 year old Max Vandenburg, son of an old Jewish Army friend from World War I, who saved his life. Max and Liesel become good friends, but when Hans offers a piece of bread to a Jew being marched to Dachau, Max is forced to leave because of fear the Gestapo with come search the Hubermann house. Much later, Liesel sees Max being marched with other Jews to Dachau. Liesel is whipped by a Nazi guard for approaching Max in the crowd of Jews.
In despair, Liesel breaks into the mayor’s library and destroys a book: Soon, there is nothing but scraps of words littered all around her. Words, she realizes, have been used so wrongly to empower the Führer:
The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make up feel better. What good were the words? (pg 521)
Ironically, it is the mayor’s depressed wife who convinces Liesel to begin writing, to change the words and make them right again. In the basement where she learned to read, Liesel begins to write a story called
The Book Thief. The novel follows Liesel from a 9 year old who can’t read a single word to a 14 year old who realizes the true power of wo
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| Left is the original cover for Blue. Right is the new Blue cover. |
Last December 4th, I wrote about a book called
Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter. As you can see above,
Blue has been given a new cover AND now it has a new book trailer.
And I thought I would rerun the original post, for anyone who may not have seen it.
'If you ask folks around here what they remember about the year 1944,
A child might say, "That was the year my daddy went off to fight Hitler."
A mother might look off towards Bakers Mountain and whisper that
polio snatched up one of her young'uns.
And the Hickory Daily Record will say that my hometown gave
birth to a miracle.' (pg9)
It is January 1944. Everyone in Hickory, NC is focused on the war, including Ann Fay Honeycutt’s family, especially now that her father is off to war to fight Hitler. But even though he is the one going away, 13 year old Ann Fay feels like this moment is the beginning of a journey for her too. Her journey begins when her father gives Ann Fay a pair of overalls and tells her that while he is gone, she needs to be the man of the house. This means planting the victory garden with the help of Junior Bledsoe, a neighbor’s son. It also means looking after her 6 year old twin sisters, Ida and Ellie and her brother Bobby, 4. He tells Bobby to help out, but to make sure he plays everyday.
Things go well until the middle of June 1944. Suddenly, everybody’s focus in Hickory, NC is no longer on the war, but has shifted to their own small county – 12 cases of polio have been diagnosed in Catawba County and the number is steadily climbing. Because Hickory was hardest hit by this polio epidemic, a
On the occasional Wednesday, I review a book written during World War II. It was a time when no one knew what was going to happen from moment to moment, so they offer a very different perspective on the war.
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Dustjacket image courtsey of
Lasting Words Ltd.
Northampton, UK |
I was really in the mood for a 'jolly' school story, so I pulled
Pamela G.M. off the shelf and reread it. It was published in 1941 and is the fourth book on Hadath’s Pamela series, but the only one I have read and, as far as I know, the only one set during the war.
The story opens sometime after the war has begun, but Miss Grammett’s boarding school for girls’ in the village of Chinbury, England is going to carry on as usual and resist evacuation.
The school has been given a mobile canteen, to be used for driving around to where troops are located and selling them cups of tea and biscuits, along with other necessary items like soap, shoelaces and razor blades. It was assumed that Miss Grammett’s husband would drive the canteen, but he has no interest in doing it. Pamela, a student who has already learned to drive, manages to finagle the necessary documentation allowing her to drive the canteen, even though she is underage.
But this is not just Pamela’s story, and the book skips around and tells of the adventures of different students, which are separate but still connected to each other. Each schoolgirl is given a job to help the war effort and Fanny Gates is made the treasurer of the War Savings Fund. Her job is to collect money from the people for the fund, and her trials of getting money from the other girls are recounted in one chapter. In another chapter, a student is sent to deliver a message to chair of the Chinbury Food Week campaign and manages to capture a German spy. Later, one of the younger students inadvertently ends up taking an airplane ride with a famous woman flyer modeled somewhat on Amy Johnson. Other girls are assigned to do knitting or land work for a neighboring farmer.
All of these chapters are quite humorous and entertaining except for the last one, which is quite serious. Pamela, along with her partner Martha Tydd, are driving around the countryside in their mobile canteen, trying to find out where the soldiers have been relocated, when they hear the sound of airplanes. Soon, they see bombs being dropped on the small village of Combe Edge. As they drive into the village, they see some shops burning and a badly injured woman being carried out to the street. Pamela hears the docto
When My Name Was Keokol is written in the first person, but with an interesting twist. The story of the Kim family in Korea during World War II is told in the alternating voice of Sun-hee, 10, and her brother, Tai-yul, 13. The story begins in 1940. The Japanese have occupied Korea since 1910, systematically suppressing Korean culture in favor of their own, and now, they want every Korean to change their names to a Japanese name. Sun-hee becomes Keoko, Tae-yul is given the name Nobuo and their last name Kim is changed to Kaneyama. Everyone is unhappy about this name change, but what can they do? Quietly resisting, the Kim family can and do remain Korean within their homes and within their hearts.
Their father’s brother, Uncle, lives with the family and runs a printing store. As the Japanese become more and more restrictive, it seems that Uncle is cozying up to them, getting many additional printing jobs from them. Sun-hee and Tai-yul are wondering if there fiercely pro-Korea Uncle has suddenly become
Chin-il-pa, a “lover of Japan.”
Chin-il-pa is are Koreans who gets rich because they cooperate with the Japanese government (pg 22) and they are thought of as traitors by other Koreans.
Sun-hee and Tae-yul decide to investigate Uncle’s activities, only to discover that he not
Chin-il-pa, but working for the Korean resistance movement. His outward friendly display towards the Japanese is an attempt to keep their suspicions at bay. One night, Sun-hee’s old Japanese friend Tomo comes by to hint that Uncle is in danger. Sun-hee immediately warns her Uncle and he disappears, no one knows to where. Now, during their nightly accounting, when everyone must stand outside their homes for as long as the Japanese want them to, they search the Kim home to find evidence of Uncle’s activities.
The Japanese authorities continue make life very hard for the Koreans, asking for more and more to be sacrificed for the Emperor. And they become even harsher and more demanding as they begin to lose the war. Families are forced to give up metal including pots and pans and their jewelry to be melted into munitions. Small acts of defiance follow these demands – Sun-hee’s mother hides a meaningful dragon brooch in her underwear. When her rows of Sharon trees, which had been the national flower of Korea, are ordered cut down and burned, in favor of Japanese Cherry Trees, she has the children save one small tree. They replant it and hide it in the tool shed.
Then, to make matters worse, towards the end of the war, Tae-yul, who has always been fascinated with machines and airplanes, unknowingly volunteers as a kamikaze pilot in the Japanese Special Attack Unit. Must they now make the ultimate sacrifice for their oppressors?
When My Name Was Keoko moves along less by action and more by description, almost like a diary of each child’s experiences. This also means that Park can more naturally include a lot of Korean history and culture without lapping into a kind of pedantic exposition that would cause the reader to lose interest. Park’s characters are well rounded, with a true to life feel to them. I was particularly drawn not just to Sun-hee but also to her elderly neighbor Mrs. Ahn, who in her own way refuses to accept the Japanese.
Among the many things in her Author’s Note at the end of the novel, Park writes that this novel was inspired by many of the stories her parents told her about their lives growing up in Korea during World War II. In fact, the na
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I love this series! And thanks for sharing the interviews - such a delightful man with so much to share about the writing process.
I really appreciate your post this week. Somehow, I've missed keeping up with this series. The Doucette has the first couple at that's it.
Thanks for participating in this week's Nonfiction Monday.
Tammy
Apples with Many Seeds
I live in CT and had no idea about these books. I am looking them up tomorrow. These sound like books that some of my 5th graders will be able to enjoy during our HF unit. They need books on all levels. Thanks for sharing.
I also love this series and I love the illustrations that are included. Tomie dePaolo has added so much to the enjoyment of children's books and really knows how to speak to kids in them.
This is really a wonderful series and the content is still very timely for kids.
Yes, they probably would be good for some of the kids you have. I used them in my 4th grade class for the readers still on chapter books and even though they take place in the 1940s, the kids still liked and related to them.
Oh my goodness, I had no idea this series existed. We love dePaola here! (My daughter is only 3 so we haven't gotten to chapter books yet) Thanks for this post!
I love it, "This post probably contains spoilers." In all seriousness, this sounds like a fascinating series. Thank you so much for sharing.
How powerful! I love what you are doing with your blogs Alex. I just read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks and it made me realize how our kids' generation are so far removed from the horrors of the World Wars, the lessons we've learned from them, and the implications for the present and the future. What a precocious 6 year old to be writing in a diary (with waaaay better handwriting than my son, can I just say!) about his thoughts around such complex issues.
Thank you so much for linking into the Kid Lit Blog Hop! I'm now following this blog via email. :)