Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America

Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America (Chicago Review Press, November, 2012, Young Adult) is the actual diary of Joan Wehlen Morrison (1922-2010), beginning in 1937, when she is fourteen, and continuing to February, 1942.    Joan Wehlen was clearly destined to become a writer--her diary entries, transcribed by her daughter after her death, are funny, coherent, thoughtful, and diverting.

Joan starts her diary as a high school sophomore in Chicago, at a time when the country was recovering (mentally and materially) from the Great Depression.   Her journal entries are full of the everyday doings of a bright, friendly girl--thoughts on her teachers, classmates, a bit about whether she's thin, what she thinks about religion, watching her paramecium inexplicably die in biology, her work on the school paper, boys she's crushing on....and darker things too.  She is tested for tb, and found to be on the borderline of having it--she must periodically have her chest x-rayed.   And even in 1937, the shadow of war haunts her nightmares. 

As the war in Europe progress, and as Joan grows up, she (naturally) moves beyond the light-hearted school girl she was.   Though I found these years less immediately entertaining, from a social history point of view, they were interesting as all get out.  I was powerfully reminded that it was not clear in the late thirties in the US that this was a war that we were inevitably going to have to fight. Joan is terrified by the thought of it, thinks of Winston Churchill as "pig face," and rejects patriotic fervor.   And then, only a few months before Joan puts down her diary, Pearl Harbor is bombed.  There's a forced brightness to these entries, with Joan talking more about boys than about the war, but under that gloss, it's clear that it's filling her mind.

This is one I'd give in a second to anyone who loves historical school girl stories and stories of home front girls--I was variously reminded of Daddy-Long-Legs, Betsy-Tacy, and Rilla of Ingleside.   If you like those books, you will almost certainly join me in loving Joan's high school diary entries with a passionate intensity, laughing out loud at both her words and her doodles, and sharing with her the sometimes painful process of growing up.  I wish I could have been her friend, because she really does sound like a kindred spirit:

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm really laughing at the things I say or if I mean them.  I catch myself saying things and find myself grinning at something--inside I mean." (page 23).

Here's one example of a passage that made me laugh out load--Joan studying biology on her bus ride home in 1938:

"Then I went back to the difference between man and animals.  Very slight, it seems.  I was testing myself out to see if I was human.  Seeing if my thumb was opposable (by wiggling it) and if I had a definite chin (thrusting it out) and if my great toe was opposable (very hard in shoes). By this time, the man next to me also seemed to need proof that I was human and took quite an interest in my experiments.  In most points I seemed human so I gave up and went back to one-celled animals.  Man went back to his magazine" (page 77).

Joan may be naive in some ways, as so many young teenagers are, but she is not the product of a "more innocent time."  In one searing entry written in 1940 (pages 140 to 146), she reflects on her generation--how their parents, coming out of WW I "...had the awful feeling of being "timed"-that they must hurry and gobble life or it would leave them."  How "...though most of us were loved, we were, most of us, lucky not to be abortions."   Then came the Great Depression, and Joan tells how her family, like so many others, lost their house and became poor.  And how those lean years shaped the physical health of her generation.

"Oh you, my generation! --we were  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.  Because we weren't fooled, you know.  All through those bright-colored years of adolescence we knew we were growing up to disaster.  For at least four years--well, three, before it happened, we knew it was coming.  Some sort of inner sense of war lay upon us." (page 143)

And having read Joan's descriptions of her nightmares of war, I believe her.

In one of her last entries, she says that she thinks she's written her diary "with the intention of having it read someday....I rather like the idea of a social archaeologist pawing over my relics" (page 229). And indeed, this is one I'd recommend with great conviction to social historians. 

I just really truly wish she'd kept on writing in her diary!  The ending comes too soon (and I was expecting from the title that we'd see more actual "home front-ness), and though we know, from the introduction her daughter wrote, that Joan went on to a happy marriage, three kids, and a career as a writer, still, I would have liked more of her own words...and I would really have liked her thoughts on the 1950s and the Cold War!  She did, however, go on to write, with her son, a book about the sixties--From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It (1987).

Review copy gratefully received from the publisher.  Will be kept for re-reading and sharing.

(I've thrown this into this week's Non-Fiction Monday round-up, hosted today by The Flatt Perspective)

At the Firefly Gate, by Linda Newbery, for Timeslip Tuesday

Most time travel stories take a person back, or forward--they are still themselves. More rarely, the central character becomes part of someone else's life, thinking that person's thoughts, seeing what that person saw. At the Firefly Gate (2004) by Linda Newbery, uses that later sort of time travel, and mixes it, very gently, with a bit of ghost story.

Young Henry is cross at the world, but in particular with the parents who moved him from his happy life in London off to a village cottage in Suffolk--the summer ahead seems lonely and pointless. But although Grace, the slightly older girl next door, lives up to his expectations and is hostile, Henry's first weeks in his new home are not at all what he expected. There's Grace's old aunt, Dotty, slowly dying but full of life. There are friendly kids in the village, who take Henry into their world.

And then there is the man who stand by the gate outside Henry's house in the late evening, smoking, and waiting...while all around him flash the lights of fireflies (and the author actually does make clear that these are glow-worms, this being England, just in case you were worried about that point).

Henry feels drawn to this mysterious man, who no one else seems to see. And stranger still is that, from time to time, Henry finds himself briefly living bits that man's memories....of life as a young man in the air force, in World War II.

In the garden next door, Dotty still wonders what happens to the Henry she lost long ago, when his plane never came home. The modern day Henry's memories of the past hold the answer, if he can bring himself to talk to her about what he has seen.

And by the fire fly gate, the other Henry is waiting...

I first read about this one over at The Children's War, where you can find a more detailed synopsis, if you are so inclined. I heartily agree with what Alex says about this one--that the main characters, Henry, Grace, and Dotty, are believable individuals, who, more to the point as far as my reading pleasure is concerned, I found likable and interesting (even prickly Grace!). And it was just simply nice to read about a moving, unforced and unpreachy friendship between a boy and an old woman.

The timeslipiness and ghost-ness added just the right amount of poignant magic, and if I never was that much the wiser for why Henry in the present was able to channel Henry from the past, I didn't care.

So all in all, a very satisfying mix of the mundane life of kids in an English village with memories and mysteries from World War II. Strongly recommended to people who like the same books I like,* who will find it pleasantly diverting.

*which is totally different from recommending a book to all and sundry. This is why I dislike giving stars--this one, for instance, I feel is a solid 4.3381 (I thought about that number for a long time; it is not meant to be funny) on the scale of my personal taste, but yet I hesitate to press it wildly and extravagantly into the hands of all comers, because it is driven by character and emotion, with not much that happens, and it has a dream-like quality that some might find chaffing (and Henry's blossoming social life would be hard for a cynic to swallow). In short, it's all very Difficult, this reviewing thing.

But I'm glad that Alex recommended it strongly enough so that I picked it up.

Dark Passage, by M.J. Putney, for Timeslip Tuesday

If it's Tuesday, it's time travel in these parts (mostly). Today's book is a sequel to Dark Mirror, by M.J. Putney, which I reviewed back in August. In that book we met "the Irregulars," a group of young aristocrats from an alternate early 19th-century England in which magical talents are real, but considered an abominable taint in those of noble blood. Such young people are sent to a special institution for the eduction of the tainted...and there, despite the efforts of those in charge to squelch their magic, a group of students has banded together to practice their gifts, and, what is more, to use them to travel through through time to help Britain win World War II!!!!!

In Dark Passage (St. Martin's Griffin, 2011, YA, 320 pages) Troy, Cynthia, Justin and Jack head off again from the 19th century into war-torn France. Their mission--to rescue a scientist whose work Jack's premonitions have indicated will somehow avert a disater. But when Troy et al. arrive in the future, they are faced with an impregnable fortress, heavily guarded. Will their magical powers be enough to free not only one scientist, but all the prisoners held there?

And what will become of the forbidden love between Justin and Troy? Will he have to choose between the dukedom he loves, and stands to inherit, or his beloved? And what of Cynthia, proud and acid-tongued? Will she be able to set aside her bitterness and snobbish mindset, and acknowledge her feelings for Jack?

Romance, time travel, magical abilities, and World War II adventure combine to make this a fun read. I was especially pleased by the parts of the book that involved Cynthia--it's more fun (for me at any rate) to watch a difficult personality changing then it is to watch two people obsessed with their forbidden, passionate love. The adventure was just fine; it moved a nice pace and was plausible enough (allowing for the magic brought to bare on the situation) for it to convince, more or less. It was never all that tense, because it was pretty clear they would all rescue each other, but it gave the characters something to do.

I continued to be bothered by the anachronistic choice of names (Troy and Justin sound so 1980s to me), but it can't be helped, and since I knew I'd be bothered by it, I was able to ignore it. We don't get much sense of WW II France, or England, here, so the time travel falls into the "impetus for adventure" category, rather than the "chance to describe character's reactions to a different time" one.

I preferred the first book, simply because I enjoy learning about things for the first time more than revisiting them, and because I liked the school setting that was more prominently featured there. This is another reason why I liked Cynthia's story line best in Dark Passage- it had a nice thread of unpleasant school-girl becoming reformed character to it, that I, a fan of the British school girl genre, appreciated lots.

The third book, Dark Destiny, comes out next August--I'll most definitely be reading it!

Dark Mirror, by M.J. Putney

Dark Mirror, by M.J. Putney (St. Martin's Press, 2011, 304 pp)

Young Lady Victoria lives in an early 19th-century England where a fair number of people have magical gifts--Tory, for instance, finds herself floating one morning when she is sixteen, and finds the sensation rather pleasing. Less pleasing is the fact that magic is verboten to the upper classes; no girl known to have magical gifts will ever be presented at court. Instead, a stint at Lacklands school awaits, where the tainted children of the nobility are sent to be "cured."

Tory is not so sure that she wants to repress her magical gifts, and when she finds that there are others at Lacklands who think that magic might actually be something to celebrate (and potentially useful in a military way, what with the threat of Napoleon looming across the channel), she joins in their forbidden night time classes. As an added bonus, two of her classmates are young men who are more than a little attractive....

Ok. That's the first half of the book-- and it's rather a pleasant magic school story, made interesting by the fact that the school exists to squelch the magic! Putney never had me quite convinced that it really was set in Regency England (for one thing, the nickname "Tory" felt out of place to me, and the dialogue didn't quite convince me), but still it was a just fine story, if not a terribly original conceit.

But--the second half of the book was a whole nother story, with the plot taking a dramatically different and utterly unexpected twist that changed everything! It becomes a time travel book!

Read on if you want to learn what period was time-travelled to and why! Stop reading now if you haven't read it yet, because I'm about to go back to plot summary mode and it will be spoilerish.

Under Lacklands school is a mirror made by Merlin (!) that transports people through time. And Tory and some of her close friends (including both cute guys) accept the chance to use their despised magical gifts to help their country in its time of greatest danger. Forget Napoleon--World War II is happening, and the British soldiers trapped at Dunkirk need all the help they can get....

Yes, early 19th-century magical teens come forward in time to help with Dunkirk!

I found this tremendously diverting.

I never did feel all that convinced by Putney's WW II era Britain either, and there were sentences and bits of scenes that didn't quite work for me. For one thing, although Tory is new to the actual study of magic and her own gifts, she manages to do things I couldn't believe she was capable of. For another, the romance was very much of the chemistry/electrical connection type, with mysterious Issues involved, and so not my thing, and the guy in question is named Justin, which I don't think was all that common in English aristocratic circles of the early 19th century (correct me if I'm wrong!).

However, even though I never truly had confidence in the author, and kept questioning things, it was a fun time-travel adventure. And there will be a sequel (Dark Passage, Sept, 2011)! Tory and co. will go back to WW II France, and use their magic some more! I am looking forward to it lots....






And isn't it pretty?

All Clear, by Connie Willis, for this Wednesday's Timeslip Tuesday

I started reading All Clear, by Connie Willis (2010) Monday morning...but it's a long book, and I didn't finish till Tuesday night, too late to make my Tuesday Timeslip deadline....so here it is today!

All Clear is the second half of a time travel saga that began with Blackout (my review), and the two need to be read back to back. It picks up right where the first book ended (anyone who hasn't read Blackout will be completely lost), with three historians from the 2060s stranded in World War II London. Polly, Eileen, and Mike are growing increasingly desperate--their paths back to the future are blocked, and no-one seems to be coming back in time to save them. For all three, every day in the past brings dangers from the blitz, and the worry that they will somehow do something that will change the course of history. But for Polly in particular, there is a greater danger. She had already gone back in time to observe the celebrations of VE day...and to be there again will kill her.

Much of the story involves the desperate circumstance of London in the blitz, a frenetic background for the three historians efforts to find a way home. Interspersed are flashes from Polly's future trip a few years after the blitz, along with the adventures of of a young man named Ernest, up in Scotland in 1944, trying to fool the Nazis into thinking the allied invasion of France will take place anywhere but Normandy. It's a busy, busy series of events and excitements, as bombs fall, buildings burn, and lives are saved, and lost. Small acts of courage abound, as do desperate acts of bravery, and there was almost too much Happening, in a fates conspiring against the central characters way, for me to enjoy large sections of the story.

Yet through all this chaos I had faith (having read all her other books) that Willis knew exactly what she was doing, and I was rewarded. As the book races towards its conclusion, the emotional intensity keeps ratcheting upward...and it became utterly un-put-downable and profoundly moving. The implications of time travel, the ramifications of the actions of ordinary people in horrible situations, and the question of what constitutes heroism all come together at the end to make this much, much more than an interesting look at World War II (although it is that).

Although this didn't, for me, have quite the devastating emotional punch those of Willis' novels that effected me most profoundly (Lincoln's Dreams and Passage), because I do think that some of the frenetic action could have been pruned somewhat (1,168 pages, the combined total of the two books, is rather a lot), it is still an incredibly powerful story, masterfully told.

Here's a review of both books at The Children's War.

Ghost of Heroes Past, by Charles Reid, for Timeslip Tuesday

Before I begin the review of this week's book, I just want to share that Alyce at At Home With Books has kicked of a Time Travel Reading Challenge! I guess my goal is to read 52 time travel books in the coming year, since that's how many Tuesdays there will be....Alyce has a nice list of time travel books in her announcement post, and, just in case any readers of this blog don't know, I have a full list of my review of time travel books here, sorted by time period and age range. And now, today's Timeslip Tuesday book:

Ghost of Heroes Past, by Charles Reid ( Ronsdale Press, 2010, middle grade, 170 pages)

Johnny Anders is an ordinary Canadian boy, of the lonely, daydreaming kind. But his life becomes utterly extraordinary when the ghost of a soldier begins visiting him at night. This ghost takes Johnny back into the past, showing him scenes from World Wars I and II in which Canadian men and women were present. The moving acts of heroism he witnesses include those of Bill Chong, risking his life to carry military intelligence through the havoc of south Asia in WW II, a nurse, Joan Bamford Flecher, who refuses to believe that the impossible task of bringing hundreds of wounded civilians to safety is impossible, and numerous other brave men and women, some of whom never made it home. These night-time excursions have a profound effect on Johnny, encouraging him to recognize that there might be a reason why he's been chosen by the ghost--he, too, has the gift to make stories from history become real, through his writing.

In the present, his self-confidence, minute to start with, is bolstered by his growing friendship with a new girl in town. Casey has self-confidence to spare--so much so that she dresses in gungy clothes, wanting to be judged for her character, not by her appearance. She has an interest in the two world wars herself--her great grandfather fought in both. And when Johnny begins to share his experience with her, it turns out that her great grandfather is one of the heroes whose story Johnny has been observing. She is an eager audience for his stories, who encourages him to explore his own talents as a historian...and she becomes more than just a friend.

I myself am fascinated by the two world wars, and Reid does a beautiful job telling his stories in gripping fashion. I was riveted. His presentation of the wars is balanced--he makes a stab at explaining why the Japanese did some of the horrible things they did, instead of just dismissing them as Bad, and he never glorifies or sugar-coats the realities of war. I do wonder, though, why the ghost who visits Johnny is fixed on the two world wars--this is never explained. (The ghost himself isn't exactly explained either, but I am comfortable letting that slide--it's fantasy, after all).

The other story, of Casey back in real life, requires much more suspension of disbelief--I don't think that anyone that confident really exists in any middle school. But it sure would be great if they did, and I enjoyed the growing friendship between the two, even though it also required great suspension of disbelief that Casey would really fall for Johnny...she somehow is attracted to something more than just the stories he tells, and I was never quite convinced that I saw what she did in him!

Time travel-wise, this is firmly in the didactic camp--Johnny, and the reader, are Being Taught Lessons, and Johnny remains a passive observer throughout. For those like me, who enjoy learning through fiction, this works well. And I think the book has enough excitement and mystery to hold the interest of its intended audience of young readers who enjoy historical fiction, although those who don't enjoy historical fiction for the sake of the history might find it a bit disjointed.

In the acknowledgements, Reid states that "the stories of military actions are as recorded, either by military archives, or as told by the actual participants in interviews with the author." I wish he'd made this more obvious, by including more information about this aspect of the book in an afterword. I only thought to look at the acknowledgements just now, and finding that the author seems to have actually been in touch with Bill Chong, for instance, adds, for me, a layer of interest that I think could have been developed in more detail, with pointers on how to find more information. I went poking about online, and found, for instance, this site on Canadian Chinese Veterans, where there's a picture of Bill Chong's employment letter (shown at right).

Note on age appropriateness: there is some pretty hard core horrible-ness of war described here. People die, and I think it might disturb younger readers. The growing relationship between the two kids also kicks this up a bit toward the older range of middle grade (11 to 12 year olds), even though they do no more than exchange a chaste kiss.

(a rather less favorable review of the book can be found at Quill and Quire, the Canadian book review magazine--and they do raise some valid points. But whatever the reason, Ghost of Heroes Past worked for me!)

Review copy gratefully received from the publisher for Cybils consideration.

Blackout, by Connie Willis, for Timeslip Tuesday

Blackout, by Connie Willis(Ballantine Books, 2010, 491 pages)

In previous novels --Doomesday Book (1993), and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1999), Connie Willis sent history students travelling back in time from a future Oxford. Blackout is set in this same universe, a few years down the line. Things are getting a little harried at the time travel control center, what with people popping in and out of time and space, demanding accents and golf lessons and era-appropriate clothing and props. Schedules are being changed with little notice, there are temporal slippages, and one theorist is warning that there might be issues, as it were, with time travel...

Three students of history are busily studying aspects of World War II. Merope is embedded as a maid at a country house full of evacuees, Polly is off to London to work as a shop girl during the blitz, and Michael is studying "heroism," and plans to interview a sample of Dunkirk rescue participants. All are pretty confident that the boss of time travel operations, Mr. Dunworthy, won't let anything bad happen to them. After all, he's been very particular in his insistence that they not stay in particular places that are going to be bombed, and that sort of thing.

But then things go wrong. The war seems to be progressing as it should. But Michael shouldn't have been able to actually take part in the evacuation of Dunkirk. Merope shouldn't have been trapped by a measles epidemic. And Polly's way home has been bombed... Surrounded by the chaos and death of WW II, the three young time travellers being to wonder if there is a glitch in time...one that might result in a more in-depth experience of the past then anyone would ever want.

This is a book that demands the attention of the reader, and then rewards it tremendously. In many ways, it is like being part of a series of nightmares--the chaos and the confusion experienced by the protagonists (not just in WW II, but in Oxford of 2060, as they try to prepare for their missions) was almost too much for me. The short chapters that jumped between the character's point of view added to my difficulties.

As the book progressed, however, and I got more of a handle on the three main stories I was being told (and the protagonists got more of a handle on their own circumstances), I became fully absorbed in Willis' utterly gripping portrayal of the fall of 1940. During the last two hundred pages or so I might not have blinked, I was so lost to the real world. Willis manages to combine emotional depth with bright surface detail, making for very good reading indeed.

But then came the cliffhanger of an ending. The second book, All Clear (coming this fall) really is, it seems, a continuation, not a sequel. There is NO closure to this book, and nothing is explained. And in consequence, I think I might have read Blackout too carelessly in my riveted state, and missed Important Clues. For instance (not a spoiler), on page 454 a character thinks: "Unless...oh, God, she hadn't even thought of that possibility. She'd assumed...but that was even worse..." And I have no idea at all what this person is thinking....and then the book ended soon after. Argh. I wonder if I am now assuming worse-er things than the character is, or if there are Horrors that haven't crossed my mind.

Blackout is a fine example of the sort of time travel story in which the immersion of the characters in the past is central--it is almost more historical fiction than sci fi/fantasy. But because the characters are from the future, and know what happens, their perceptions of the past that they are living have a certain type of poignancy to them that straight historical fiction doesn't. To be friends with someone you know is dead, to see a cathedral you know will be bombed, is to see the world in a whole different light, and Willis conveys this beautifully.

But you might want to wait a few months more before reading this, until All Clear is out and ready to hand!

Jimmy's Stars, by Mary Ann Rodman

The second book I've completed for today's Read-a-Thon is Jimmy's Stars, by Mary Ann Rodman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, middle grade, 257 pages).

About an hour ago I needed a break from the very dense fantasy I was reading, and picked up a book that I happened to have out from the library about which I had heard good things. Now I am still sniffing a little as I type this, because this story of a girl on the homefront in WW II made my cry like a baby...

Ellie's big brother Jimmy was the light of her life. He was the one who made her feel special, who brought joy to everything they did together. So when Jimmy went off to war, Ellie clung to his promise that he'd be back. Long months of missing him past, with Ellie navigating the ins and outs of middle school, trying to get used to the aunt who moved into his room, and coping with the extra work around the house that she has to shoulder with her mother doing war work...but all the while she clings to the promise that he'd made, that he'd be back. And Ellie, just as she had promised, keeps the Christmas tree up, waiting for him.

And then, on page 201, comes the part where I start crying...

I wasn't quite sure if I was going to like this book for the first few chapters--Ellie's life was so ordinary, and she herself was neither particularly likable or dislikable. Just an average girl with an average family. But as the war came closer and closer to home, and Ellie began to realize all its implications, and I was hooked. I think Rodman does a great job with this important part of the book--not didactic, or overtly anti-war, but making clear that heroism isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Jimmy is, by any definition, a hero, but Rodman makes it clear that more importantly than that, he is also a good person. The most moving part of the book was when Ellie's family discovered all the many small ways in which he had done good things for others.

A fine book indeed, although I worry that the young reader might be off-put by the slow start, and I am afraid that boys, who might well benefit from the book, will not even give it any sort of chance. Especially not with the cover on the hardback, shown above. The British paperback cover, at right, is much more appealing.

That being said, my own 9 year old liked the naughty rhyme about Hitler and Mussolini very much (which I probably should not have been sharing with him, but I guess it's Educational to know who Mussolini is, as well as the more obvious Hitler...). But he didn't like it enough to want to read the book....sigh.

Here's the review at Biblio File that made me want to read the book.

The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, by Michael Morpurgo

After the Cybils ended, and I had the freedom to read whatever the heck I wanted, I went a little crazy with interlibrary loans, requesting about fifteen books pretty much at random from my long to-be-read list. Some of the books have been on it for over a year, and I've forgotten why I added them in the first place...

One rather pleasant surprise from this recent batch was The Amazing Story of Adolpuhs Tips, by Michael Morpurgo (Scholastic, 2005, middle grade, 140 pp).

In 1943, an eleven year-old girl named Lily lives in a seaside village in England. War has brought evacuees from the cities to her school, and American soldiers are filling the streets, but life for Lily and her beloved cat, Tips, goes on pretty much as normal.

Then her entire village is ordered to leave. It is going to become a training ground for the Americans preparing for D-Day. But Tips doesn't understand his old home is now forbidden ground, and Lily risks her life going back beyond the fences to try to find him...

An American soldier, the first black person she has ever met, promises to help her. Though they meet seldom, they become true friends. And years later, when both are old, their paths cross again.

It's a gentle book, the sort that, even though I sniffed a bit in places, is a comfort read--even though the war brings disruption and loss, friendship triumphs, and Tips is found. This is a book cat-loving girls who like stories of World War II England will love--my only complaint was that at 140 pages, it was too short.

Mare's War, by Tanita Davis

It rained again this morning, so no weeding. The children and house guests slept late, and the house was tidy. So I got a lovely two hours in which to read a book I've been saving for just such a window of opportunity--Mare's War, by Tanita Davis (2009, Alfred A. Knopf, 343pp). And the two hours flew by in happy, deeply satisfied reading...

Mare's War tells of two journeys. In a car speeding (or not, depending on the driver) across America to a mysterious reunion are two teenage girls (who had their own, more teenagerishly appropriate plans for the summer) and their grandmother, Marey Lee (known as Mare), who planned the trip. On the way, their grandmother tells them the story of her own great journey, seventy or so years before, when she escaped from her home in Bay Slough, Alabama and went to war.

The two sister, Octavia and Talitha, squabble, fret, drag their feet, and send occasional postcards of complaint to friends and family (shown in the book, in a nicely light touch), but as the miles pass, and their grandmother's story unfolds, the tone of the postcard messages changes. Their grandmother's life as Marey Lee, an African American teenager in the Women's Army Corps has them fascinated. The friendships she made, the prejudice she encountered, and the historical pageant of which she was a part are spellbinding stuff. This is an eye-openingly powerful narrative that educates without being didactic, filling a blank space in the history of World War II without ever loosing sight of Marey Lee, the girl.

It was a story that sure kept me enthralled (although I'm glad I didn't have to drive 2,340 miles from California to Alabama in summer with my sisters and grandmother to hear it).

Davis manages to make her teenagers in the present interesting people in their own right, and not just vessels created to receive Mare's story, but their sibling relationship and 21st century teenage angsts pall in comparison to what their grandmother went through (to give them credit, they realize this). In essence, Mare's War is first rate historical fiction, set in a modern narrative that, I think, makes it much more accessible and appealing to teenagers than Marey Lee's story, served straight up, might have been.

So today I moved my Madeline L'Engle books down to the playroom, and shelved Mare's War in the section I think of as "British Girls Books," even though they aren't by any means all British. They are, though, all books that put girls front and central--books about girls doing things, and communities of girls, and career stories. And that, in my mind, is where Mare's War belongs. I'll be recommending this book at a yahoo group I belong to (Girls Own), that focuses on British girls' boarding school books--the relationships between young women, their education, the career choices they made, and the windows they often offer on life as a girl many years ago are all here in Marey Lee's story.

I'm also more than happy to recommend this to fans of World War II historical fiction--it's a great addition to that genre. And while I'm at it, it's a great road trip story too!

Anyway. I hope Mare's War will be happy shelved next to Hester Burton's books (more great historical fiction), and one shelf up from Helen Doyle Boylston...who is best known for intrepid nurse Sue Barton, but who also wrote a rather interesting memoir of her World War I experiences--Sister: The War Diary of a Nurse.

Other reviews of Mare's War can be found at Reading in Color, Reading Rants, The HappyNappyBookseller, Jen Robinson's Book Page, and Colleen Mondor.

Disclosure: Tanita Davis is a blog friend of mine, and I was lucky enough to win a copy of the book from one of her giveaways. So, although I was very glad to write what I think is a glowing review (at least, it's meant to be) of her book, I just want to make it clear that I would have written this even if I had never met her (in an online sense).

Time to Go Back, by Mabel Esther Allan for Timeslip Tuesday

Time to Go Back, by Mabel Esther Allan (1972, 134 pp, upper middle grade to YA)

Mabel Esther Allan was an incredibly prolific English writer of the mid-twentieth century, who wrote adventure/mystery stories, but with a considerable smattering of other types (this was her 113th book). Time To Go Back is, however, her only true Timeslip story, and draws heavily on her own experiences as a teenager during the bombing of Liverpool and Mersyside in WW II.*

16-year old Sarah, living in London in the 1960s, is doing her best to be a rebellious activist teenager. After a protest turns ugly, and she is arrested, she falls ill. Her lonely time at home convalescing is made more interesting when she discovers the poems of her mother's sister, Larke, who had died in the bombing of Liverpool in WW II.

When Sarah's mother suggests a long visit to her grandmother, still living in Mersyside (across the river from Liverpool), Sarah is surprisingly keen to go--she finds Larke intensely fascinating, and wants to get to know her better. But when Sarah finds the old house, where her mother and Larke lived during the war, her quest to find Larke takes her back into the past. She finds herself in the air-raid shelter in the back garden, listening with the girl who will be her mother to the bombs falling, waiting for her aunt to come home.

For the next few weeks, Sarah travels back and forth between present and past, getting to know Larke and her own mother better than she could have imagined. Her eyes are opened as well to the horror of war, as the bombs keep falling. And there in the past she has her first kiss...

Story-wise, it's pretty interesting. WWII is brought vividly to life, in an uncommon setting. There is danger, adventure, and destruction, and, which is perhaps the strongest part of the book, well-described people trying to just keep on going through it all.

Sarah is anxious and questioning enough about her time travel experiences to satisfy me (I am irked, sometimes, by overly blithe time travel), and her time in the past, and the people she meets, clearly help her grow wiser. Her growing up involves casting off the shallow, false activism of her erstwhile friends, becoming more meditative and appreciative of the past. A tad didactic, and not quite fair to teenagers of the 1960s, but there it is.

However. Allen's writing in this book is not her best. There's an over consciousness to it that I don't much care for. Here's an example, from when Sarah has just found her aunt Larke's poems, before she has gone back in time, and has realized that Larke and her mother were real people in a real war:

"That old war! It was always on television in one way or another, but I always thought of it as just part of history. Suddenly it was much more real, just because one girl, who might have lived to know me, had been able to put her joys and longings and fears into words. Other people must have done it, of course, but she had somehow caught my imagination.

There were around two dozen poems, many of them only two or three short verses. But line after line sprang out of the pages to stab me with a strange, shared pain and knowledge:

Am I to know the shivering futility
Of holding only pictures in my mind...."

Larke is just to good to be true. Not only does she write poetry, but she is deeply in love, in a more tender and true relationship than Sarah has ever dreamed was possible (me too). Sarah knows from the get go that she didn't make it through the war, and never lets her leave her pedestal of perfection (although really it's Mabel's fault).

And then there's the rather twisted romance aspect--in the past, Sarah meets a nice young man, there is some pleasant frisson, and her first kiss. Fine. But I am very disturbed that she meets that man's son and falls in love with him too! It is rather incestuous, although it didn't bother me when I was younger...

So, if you really like timeslips, and want to go somewhere interesting and moderately unusual (the blitz has been done, Liverpool not so much) in your time travel , this is a fine choice. If you are looking for a great book, perhaps not. Unless you are a young reader, perhaps a writer of poetry, perhaps more likely than the cynical older reader (me) to find Sarah's hero worship of Larke believable.

Time to Go Back ended up in a lot of American Libraries, so it might still be kicking around. Mine is the last in Rhode Island to still have its copy. I just checked it's used availability, and there are a number of 1 cent ex-library copies around.

*Since I last read this, years ago, I married someone who lived down the street from the places in the book, and was taken to Mersyside and given the grand tour. It added interest!

Sorry that I have not been as diligent as might have been with my Timeslip Tuesday posts-- I do, however, have a queue of five in the works, so it should be more regular in the next few weeks, d.v.

Timeslip Tuesday- The Devil's Arithmetic

This week's Timeslip Tuesday book (it was supposed to be last week's, but things happened) is The Devil's Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen (1988). In modern-day New York, a girl named Hannah is dragging her feet about going to her family's Passover Seder. She's tired of her extended family, and their constant remembering--she knows her grandfather survived a concentration camp, but his rants about the Nazis are nothing more to her than an embarrassment. But when she opens the front door, to let the prophet Elijah in, her life changes. Now she is Chaya, living in a Polish village in 1942, and the Nazis have their concentration camps up and running.

All too soon they arrive in Chaya's village. When the Nazis round the villagers up and cram them into boxcars, the girl from the future knows she is going to have to try to survive some of the worst horrors imaginable. When she returns to the future, she, too, has memories--of death, of friendships blooming in the most unlikely places, of the blue numbers tattooed on her aunt's arm.

Yolen does a fine job of portraying the hellishness of a concentration camp, keeping her description just bearable enough for a young reader to keep reading. And she does a fine job in telling of the importance of remembering the past. I wish, though, that she'd given us a bit more of the characters. They are almost truly real, but to me they were always just a tad overshadowed by the Larger Messages. I had read this one years ago, and did not remember caring for it over much--this may have been why. Still, speaking as one who advocates the teaching of history through fiction, this is a great middle-grade book from which to learn about the Holocost.

Timeslip-wise, it's clear that the time travelling is so that Hannah can Learn, and that weakens the magic of it. So although this book has many good points, it isn't one I'd recommend as a sterling example of Timeslip Genre as such.

This is my 22nd Timeslip review-when I get to 25 I'll make a list!

The Dolphin Crossing, thoughts on endings and the Toothfairy, and other YA Dunkirk books

The Dolphin Crossing, by Jill Paton Walsh (first published in 1967, 134 pages).

It is the spring of 1940. The British army are in France, trying to hold back the German advance. In a small village in the east of England, two teenage boys--one from a family of land owning locals, one an evacuee from London--are making friends. Pat and his stepmother, who is expecting a baby any day, had not been given a kindly welcome when they arrived from London. Instead, they had been grudgingly given the shelter of a derelict railway carriage, surrounded by cows. John, lonely, compassionate, and a bit bored, decides that his family's unused barn would make a better place to live. Working together to make the barn habitable, the boys are glad to have something productive to do while the worry of the war drags on.

But one day, they see a line of little boats heading out to sea, toward France, and they hear the story of the British army trapped on the beaches across the channel. So John and Pat, who had never even seen the sea before he left London, set out in John's little boat, Dolphin, on the same night that Pat's sister is being born. They are determined to save as many men as they can, and for the next few days they mechanically ferry boat load after boat load of men from the beach to the offshore naval vessels. Boats next to theirs are blown up, and machine gun fire from the Germans rakes across their bow. Still they keep going, back and forth, and still there are men on the beach, waiting (and I, at this point, am sniffing a bit--Dunkirk always makes me sniff).

So much of what I know of history I learned from historical fiction, and I eagerly recommend The Dolphin Crossing to anyone who wants to learn more about the early days of World War II in England, and what happened at Dunkirk. It's also, pure and simple, a really good book. Enough characterization for those of us who like that, and enough nail biting adventure for those that like that. It is short enough so as not to be daunting, but packs a punch. I think, however, that the ending stinks and that authors who do this to their readers are not nice.

spoiler, and some talk in general of what I look for in an ending, moving on to the Tooth Fairy.

At the end, John and Pat have had to go back to England because they are running out of gas. They make it home safely, although John has been hit by gunfire, and unload their boat load of soldiers into John's kitchen. And then, after a few days in bed recovering, John learns that Pat refueled the Dolphin and took her back to France, and hasn't shown up again. And that's it. Argh. I would rather know for a fact he was dead, than have it hinted at by the author, who knows I will never find out. Imagining your own endings is not the same as having them told you by the One who Knows. When I try to imagine Pat alive somewhere down the coast, having by some miracle brought the Dolphin back safely, or perhaps picked up by another boat after he sinks the Dolphin, I feel like a kid trying to believe in the tooth fairy. This is one reason I like Tolkien, who went to great pains to make sure we know what happened to everyone at the end of The Lord of the Rings.

Jill Paton Walsh is, of course, still very much alive and still writing books, but for grownups these days, so I doubt very much that she will ever save poor Pat from his fictional limbo of presumed death.

And speaking of the Tooth Fairy, it is a very good thing that we never tried very hard to get our children to believe in it. My poor little one lost a second tooth last night, in violent and bloody circumstances (it was loose, but not quite ripe, when he received a whap in the face from his older brother). So he was promised that the Tooth Fairy would bring extra money on account of the blood. Sigh. For the second time in his life, the Tooth Fairy completely failed to remember to put anything at all under his pillow.... Bad Tooth Fairy.

The Dolphin Summer might be a bit hard to find here in the US. I am not bothering to link to the US Amazon page because it says that it is a book for babies with no copies available. However, if your library, like mine, still has its books from the 1960s (which I think is a good thing) you might be in luck (anyone in Rhode Island can get it through interlibrary loan!). There are, however, many cheap used copies available in paperback in Britain, here at Amazon UK you can buy it for two cents (plus postage).

Other Dunkirk Books:

Another excellent book about an evacuee (a teenaged girl, this time) who heads off to Dunkirk is In Spite of All Terror by Hester Burton. There is also Paul Gallico's lovely and tear-inducing The Snow Goose. And if anyone happens to have a spare copy of Dunkirk Summer, by Philip Turner, which I have never read, I would be happy to take it off your hands! It has been on my Christmas Wants List for years now, and since there are no copies available ever it probably will stay there (right alongside Words and Music, by William Mayne). For more on the unavailability of Dunkirk Summer here's a 2002 article in Collecting Books and Magazines. Of course, anyone who has a spare copy who reads that article will become strangely reluctant to send it off to a stranger...

Here's how the article describes the book:

This is perhaps the best book of the nine. It's the story of a community awakening to the full horrors of the war and of young man and a young woman realising for the first time the full possibilities of their love. For a long time, like Andy Birch, the hero, the reader comes to Darnley Mills as a stranger once more. Then the charm of the familiar places, especially All Saints Church and its rectory, and some of our old favourite characters begins to exert itself. Twenty years later it is the world that will be inherited by David, Peter and Arthur but only if the community survives Hitler and his bombs. No longer a boy, not quite a man, seventeen year old Andy faces up to his future.

Sigh. I want it.

Books of 2009 I am looking forward to, Part II

I vaguely felt last week, when I was posting my list of 2009 books to which I am looking forward, that I was missing something. And in fact, I was--several somethings. To wit:

Shelter Me by Alex McAulay. I don't have long to wait for this one, since its release date was yesterday...which is good, because books that combine WW II and boarding school make me happy.

Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George (January 20). We were lucky enough to have two of her books to read for the Cybils--Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow, and Dragon Flight, and I enjoyed them both.


Betraying Season (Leland Sisters, Book 2) by Marissa Doyle (May). The sequel to The Bewitching Season, which I read for the Cybils with great enjoyment (my review).

Of course I'm looking forward to the sequel to Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins (fall), but before that comes out, I think I hope to be reading her new book 12, coming out in May from Feiwell and Friends. Although don't ask me what it is about, because I can't find any information about it.

And another book I don't know much about, other than that it is YA- Gateway, by Sharon Shinn (October).

Finally, here's one I'm looking forward to more for my 8 year old's sake than my own:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney (Jan 13)


And I think that is it, although I am probably wrong.

Elephant Run, by Roland Smith

I am an enthusiastic reader of my blog stats--today was made more joyful by learning that mine is the second entry that Google shows when asked to find "experiences with demonic birds at sea." On a slightly more mundane note, it's become obvious that many students were asked to read Roland Smith's book, Peak (2007) for their summer reading, and that they didn't (lots of searchs for "plot summary peak" etc). I myself successfully read Peak last fall when it was nominated for the Cybils*, and I enjoyed it enough (here's my review) to see what else Smith had written. Another 2007 book, Elephant Run (Hyperion, 318 pp), caught my eye, and I recently made the time to read it.

London is being blitzed, and 14 year old Nick's mother thinks that it would be a good idea to get him out of there. So she sends him off to his father's teak plantation in Burma, where he hadn't been since he was a child. Turns out this was a bad, bad idea--almost immediately, the Japanese invade Burma, take over the plantation, and send Nick's father to a prison camp. Nick remains behind in servitude to the plantation's new Japanese overlord, until, with some unlikely companions, he escapes on elephant-back to rescue his father and race for the border into India.

This story makes for an exciting read, and I'd be happy to recommend it (probably more to boys than to girls), in large part because of its unusal subject matter and setting. There aren't, as far as I know, any other YA books designed to appeal to boys that address the Japanese conquest of east Asia in WW II. If I were a high school teacher of WW II history, I would defiantly put this book on my list of optional reading.

But I didn't find Nick believable as a boy from 1941 England--he came across as an out-of-shape contemporary American teenager (which perhaps means that the book will have more appeal to that audience). I felt that the relationships between the characters only existed to further the plot, not as things of interest in and of themselves (and as a result, I found the ending a bit contrived). This made it feel to me (possibly with complete injustice) as though Smith had set out to write a Book for Boys (see above), and therefore didn't bother too much with the interactions of his characters, which is the sort of thing that Girls like to read about. Although most of the story is told from Nick's point of view, several chapters are told from that of Mya, a teenaged Burmese girl who dreams of being an elephant trainer. This was useful plot-wise, but it didn't make Mya much more of a believable character in my eyes, and (cynic that I am) I found myself thinking that Smith had given Mya her own chapters to add Girl Appeal to his Boy Appeal. There is also a friendly and poetry-loving Japanese soldier, so that we don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone in the Japanese army is Evil.

I did enjoy reading it though--it is strong on setting and story! I guess my dissatisfaction comes from my hope that this would be comparable to Neville Shute's (a wondhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giferful book), and (since that is such a wonderful book) I was bound to feel a bit let down.

*The Cybils are awards given by the kidslit blogging community to the best books in several categories. Nominations for this years awards (anyone can nominate their favorites) will be starting in October. Here's the Cybil's website for more info.

Timeslip Tuesday -- London Calling

Welcome to the second edition of Timeslip Tuesday, a day on which I look at books whose characters travel through time, and invite other bloggers to do the same (please leave a link in the comments for me to put in the post!).

Today's book is London Calling, by Edward Bloor (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 289pp).

John Martin Conway has spent seventh grade at All Souls Preparatory, New Jersey, in a state of depression. At the school on an employee scholarship (his mom's a secretary), his grades are mediocre, and his only friends two other outcasts. All three live in fear of the school bully, Hank Lowrey IV, whose great grandfather, a general in World War II, left the school a generous endowment. After school ends, he retreats to his basement bedroom, rarely coming out. When his grandmother dies, she leaves him the radio his grandfather had brought home from England in 1941, and Martin begins leaving it on as a nightlight, and its tuner, set between stations, as soothing background noise.

Then the first dream comes.

"A boy--small, thin, dressed in mud-brown clothes--leaned out from behind the radio and whispered, "Johnny, will you help me?"

And so Martin begins a strange life of travelling through time to WW II London, where the blitz is raging and Jimmy's world has become one of deadly chaos. Jimmy can't tell Martin what help he needs--instead, Martin must live through a hellish part of London's past until he sees for himself.

"As I stared down at the street, I expected to find myself transported back to my own bed, in my own time, but that didn't happen. I was still in London, in 1940, in the middle of an air raid, and I had no idea what to do next....

The scene around me was horrifying. The bombers had wreaked massive destruction , and the bombs were continuing to fall. Between the shattering bursts of the explosions, I could hear voices crying out in the dark, in pain and terror."

Trying to figure out if the people and places he sees in the past are real, Martin spends the present doing historical research, that incidentally changes received wisdom about General Lowrey. But to find out what help Jimmy needs, he must keep going back in time, until the pieces of the past fall into place. And then he must travel to England himself to bring news from the past to one who lived through it.

This is classic timesliping at its best. There are no science fiction contrivances, simply the unexplained power of the radio that calls Martin back in time. The mysterious boy from the past with his plea for help leads Martin deeper and deeper into a quest for answers. The clues that Martin learns from his visits to WW II London and his discoveries in the present combine beautifully, and as an added bonus to the story, Martin's quest to help gives him a sense of purpose that draws him out of the basement into better relationships with his family.

There's such a lot going on in this book that I glossed over large bits of it. Here are some other reviews that bring up other points -- at Bewildering Stories, at Blog Critic Magazine, and at Kittenpie Reads Kidlit.

And coincidentally, five hours before I wrote this, Colleen Mondor blogged at Guys Lit Wire about books with strong and heroic boy characters, and included London Calling. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is Martin's metamorphosis from depressed basement dweller to strong and purposeful hero, who seeks to fulfill his obligation to Jimmy no matter what. The fact that he largely accomplishes this through dogged historical research, as opposed to whacking bad guys, makes the book even more appealing in my eyes.


From other blogs:

Liz from A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy is in with a look at King of Shadows, by Susan Cooper.
Lisa from Under the Covers is in with a new one for me-- Ghost Letters, by Stephen Alter.


From Timeslipe Tuesday 1, here: Don't Know Where, Don't Know When, by Annette Laing, 2007

Timeslip Tuesday- Don't Know Where, Don't Know When

Charlotte Sometimes, The Ghosts, A String in the Harp, London Calling, The Time Garden, Moondial…all of these, and many more, are timeslip stories that I want to write about at some point. So I have decided that every Tuesday will be “Timeslip Tuesday” until I run out of books....

A timeslip story is simply one in which characters pass from one time to another, either forward or backward, generally without a mechanical device such as a time machine. I count ghost stories when the ghost characters are in fact characters traveling in time, and not just spooky special effects. If anyone reading this has a timeslip story they reviewed on their own blog, leave me a link, and I’ll make a list!

My first official Timeslip Tuesday Review is of a new book I just read for Mother Reader's 48 Hour Reading Challenge- Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When, by Annette Laing (2007, Confusion Press, 206 pages, for Middle Grade readers). It was a perfect choice—brisk story telling, likeable characters, and a great plot.

Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When throws three kids back in time from present day Snipesville, Georgia, into World War II England. Hannah, her brother Alex, and their friend Brandon are now war evacuees from London, struggling to figure out what is happening and why they have traveled through time. Then Brandon slips through time again to the England of World War I…and the mystery deepens. At its heart is the identity of George Braithwaite, the English child whose WW II identity card Brandon found in present day Georgia. Until George is found, there’s no going home.

I am very picky about books that talk about things I am knowledgeable about, in particular books that feature American kids coping with the alien life of the English, because I’ve been there and done that myself, and married as I am to someone from England, I am constantly confronted with Differences. And secondly, I am picky about books that involve time travel to periods that I know a lot about (even though in the case of WW I and II England, my knowledge comes from works of fiction). So I approached Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When in my naturally suspicious way. Not far into it, my attitude had changed—I was now rooting for the author. “Please don’t mess up!” I thought, because Laing was doing such a good job making me believe in her characters and their experience that I didn’t want any jarring mistakes to throw me out of the story. And there weren’t any to speak of—hooray!

Here’s another point that makes this book worth recommending—one of the kids, Brandon is black, and as far as I know this is the only book for kids published in America that addresses what it was like to be a black kid in WW II and WW I England. (The other two kids, Hannah and Alex, have a Portuguese last name, Dias, that gets Anglicized to Day in WW II, making this book the only work of fiction for kids that addresses the Portuguese-American Child's Experience of WW II Evacuation :) ).

This is the first book The Snipesville Chronicles; volume two (featuring the same kids, but in a different time and place) is being written. If you are looking for a new series for a kid who loved the Magic Tree House Books three or four years ago, this might well be it.



Over at Becky's Book Reviews are a great interveiw with Annette Laing, and Becky's review of this book.

Naming of Parts

Note to reader: Despite the title, this poem has nothing to do with The Higher Power of Lucky, nor with any other children's book. It has to do with Spring and War. It was written by English poet Henry Reed in 1942.


NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

At the Henry Reed website there are links that clarify and illustrate the text. Up above is one type of Japonica, at left is another.
Visit A Chair, a Fireplace & a Tea Cozy for more Poetry Friday offerings!