I liked this book even better than I did A Gentleman in Moscow, the only other book by Towles I’ve read. I think I need to read Rules of Civility next. Mr. Towles is good at spinning a yarn and tying all the loose ends together at the end. BUT as much as I liked the story and the characters and the way everything came together, I’m still not sure about the ending. I feel as if Towles took a couple of my favorite people and corrupted them, just a little, or maybe a lot. I’m worried about what will happen to these characters after the story ends. I can’t say much more about that without spoiling the ending. So, if you’ve read The Lincoln Highway and you have some reassurance to give me, put it in the comments. I could use the encouragement that everything is going to be okay with these people in their new life after they travel the Lincoln Highway.
The story is set in June, 1954. Eighteen year old Emmett Watson has just returned home from a prison work farm where he was serving a sentence of fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett’s father has recently died, his mother deserted them long ago, and Emmett is now responsible for his eight year old brother Billy. Emmett has a plan to start life anew. Billy also has a plan. And the two inmates who hid in the trunk of the warden’s car that brought Emmett home have a completely different plan.
The book could have turned into a comedy, and it borders on the absurd. However, there are some rather dark events to come, along with the ridiculous. Emmett is determined to go straight and control the temper that got him into trouble in the first place. Billy is an inordinate rule-follower with a child’s penchant for literal and concrete thinking. But the two brothers are caught up in a situation where keeping to the letter of the law and self-control in the face of violence and deceit won’t be enough to save them. So the question is how far can you bend the rules of decency and honesty and nonviolence before you become the criminals you’re trying to escape from?
It’s a good story told from several different points of view. It does take the reader inside the mind of an amoral but likable(?) sociopath and of a confused and mentally incapacitated young man, but you’re never tempted to actually condone wrongdoing or accept the excuses of those who break the law. Until maybe at the end. I’m still not sure about that ending, not even after reading this interview with author Amor Towles. If you read it, let me know what you think.
The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famineby Katherine Marsh. Roaring Brook Press, 2023.
Not having read the subtitle before beginning the book, I thought this was going to be another of the many, many books yet to come about the Covid year(s). And it was, to some extent. Matthew is a thirteen year old boy who’s been spending most of his time playing Zelda and other video games since the Covid virus made him homebound with his mother and great-grandmother. Matthew’s father, a journalist, is stuck in France, also because of the virus. The first few chapters are a little slow with Matthew acting spoiled and entitled, but the action picks up as the story switches focus to tell about the childhood experiences of Matthew’s great-grandmother, Nadiya.
But when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor – the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.
I figured out the “family secret” a couple of chapters before the revelation, but the story was told in such a way that the revelation was foreshadowed but not obvious and very satisfying to read about. Matthew got better as a character, and in his character, as he came to be interested in someone besides himself, namely his 100 year old great-grandmother. And the historical event, the Holodomor, that the book illumines is one that is too little known. Knowing about the Holodomor can help to explain some of the historical animosity that is being played out in war now in 2023.
Recommended for ages 12 and up. Starvation and disease are obviously a key aspect of this novel, although readers are mercifully spared the most graphic and horrific details.
This book is marketed as middle grade fiction, perhaps because the author’s previous books were mostly middle grade verse novels, but I believe this particular historical fiction verse novel falls firmly into the Young Adult genre and maturity level. It includes horrific violence, war, and sexual assault, and even though these things are true to the time and setting and are not gratuitously described, they are present and central to the story. Caveat emptor.
I don’t care for verse novels. I chafe at the constrictions of writing (and reading) narrative/story in a series of free verse poems. The writing of a story in the form of a series of short poems seems choppy and incomplete to me. Write a novel, or write poems, or even a long narrative poem, but don’t try to combine them.
Nevertheless, as verse novels go, this one was a well-written one. There were some striking images, and the story managed to come through in spite of the limitations of the form.
So, The Door of No Return is a book that I would recommend to older teens and adults as a window into African/Ashanti history and the history of African slavery. I do believe that it is well-researched and valuable as a window into the origins and horror of African slavery in the nineteenth century.
With those initial thoughts given, The Door of No Return is a Young Adult verse novel set in 1860’s Ghana among the Ashanti people of that area. In the fictional region of Upper Kwanta, eleven year old Kofi lives in a village with his family and enjoys hanging out with his best friend Ebo, the stories of his grandfather Nana Mosi, his flirtation with his cousin Ana, and swimming in the river Offin. He does NOT enjoy his cousin who bullies and teases him, his teacher Mr. Goodluck Phillip who thinks learning the Queen’s English is the path to future success, or the rule that says he must never swim in the river at night.
When Kofi’s brother accidentally becomes the victim of old animosities and horrific injustice, Kofi is caught up in the violence and injustice himself. And thereby Kofi has his first direct encounter with “the wonderfuls” (white men) who perpetrate the greatest injustice of all–kidnapping and slavery.
This story is an indictment of war and greed and enslavement and hatred carried across generations. In the afterword, Mr. Alexander says that this was a hard book to write, and it is also a hard book to read.I want to deny the fact that these things happened, but I cannot. I wish that the book had been written in narrative prose with detailed descriptions of Kofi’s village and his life there. But I really wouldn’t wish for any more details than are already present in the book about the suffering and cruelty that Kofi experiences. So, maybe a verse novel was the best way to go.
Highly recommended for older teens and adults, poetry lovers, historical fiction fans, and readers concerned with the issues of injustice, hope, and endurance.
I’ll just share the publisher’s (Purple House Press) disclaimer at the beginning of this review to get that off the table:
This book, written 45 years ago, tells the story of a young girl and her experiences in the Oregon Territory during the 19th century. An excellent storyteller, Evelyn SIbley Lampman provides the reader with the opportunity to explore this time and place through the eyes of the main character, including social customs, religious beliefs, and racial relations. Many aspects of life at that time are foreign and sometimes offensive to us now including specific customs, practices, beliefs, and words. To maintain and provide historical accuracy and to allow a true representation of this time period, words such as Indian, Injuns, savage, colored, and Negro have not been removed or edited.
So, Ginny is ten years old, living in Oregon Territory with her miserly and cruel distant cousins when she is sold into marriage to Mr. Mayhew, a man at least thrice her age. The marriage won’t be consummated until Ginny is fifteen at which time her kindly, but old, husband has promised to have a fine house built for her. When Mr. Mayhew comes to claim Ginny on her fifteenth birthday, it’s clear that he’s a kind man who has kept his promise to make a home for Ginny, but still Ginny is terrified, only sure that anything is better than living with Cousin Mattie and Cousin Beau.
Things go from bad to worse (or better?) when Ginny and her new husband get to their flourishing farm only to have Mr. Mayhew fall dead of a stroke. So Ginny is left with a rich farmstead and a whole train of suitors who can’t wait to offer their strength and protection to the wealthy young widow. Ginny has more important worries than finding a new husband, however. What if Cousin Mattie and Cousin Beau move into her house and take over as they are trying to do? Can Ginny stop them? What’s to be done about the Indian (Molalla) woman who’s living in the smokehouse in back? What will the townspeople think of a fifteen year old widow living alone on the farm? But who can Ginny find to stay with her other than that harridan, Cousin Mattie?
Many of the characters in this novel certainly are prejudiced, pig-headed, and close-minded. And that’s just the “good guys”, including Ginny herself at times. The cousins, the “bad guys” in the story are worse. Still, the people of the town and Ginny’s neighbors are generous, welcoming, and consistently helpful to Ginny as she learns to make a life for herself on the Oregon frontier. Their relationships with the Native Americans in the area are complicated, and this story presents some of those complications with all the nuance and compassion possible in a short young adult novel. None of the characters is completely right or completely wrong (except maybe Cousin Mattie). Some are more prejudiced than others. Some learn, like Ginny, to accept the Molalla people, even though Ginny never does completely understand their culture and actions.
At any rate, this young adult novel, and I think it is indeed young adult, maybe ages 13 and up, raises lots of good questions. What is marriage, and why is it important? Are economic reasons sufficient to make a good marriage? Are we so sure that romantic love is the only basis for a sound marriage? How old is old enough to be and adult? What if one is forced into adulthood? How do we begin to understand and value people from a completely background or culture other than our own? What if we can’t communicate? What if they don’t seem to value us or want to communicate? How do we confront racism and prejudice? Can you talk someone out of their prejudices?
I found this novel to be thought-provoking and compelling. I’m thankful that Purple House Press was able to reprint it, along with three more of Ms. Lampman’s novels: The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, Three Knocks on the Wall, and The City Under the Back Steps. You can purchase all four books from PHP, or you check them out from my library, Meriadoc Homeschool Library.
First of all, Ruth Sepetys is an excellent writer. I read three of her books,Between Shades of Grey, Out of the Easy, and Salt to the Sea, and her ability to place vivid fictional characters within an historical event and context was impressive. The first book, Between Shades of Grey, came out of Sepetys’ own Lithuanian American background and is set in Stalin’s Lithuania and Siberia. The other books, including this latest one set in Ceausescu’s Romania, show evidence of extensive historical research and an ability to create an atmosphere in reading the book that mirrors the cultural ambience of the times.
The place and time of this book are not a good place to be immersed in. In reading about a high school boy, seventeen year old Cristian Florescu, who is attempting to understand how to live in 1989 Romania, I felt a small part of what the people of Romania must have felt: claustrophobia, fear, entrapment, and suspicion. Ceausescu, his family, and his Securitate (secret police) control everything and everyone. And alongside the official apparatus, there are the civilian informers. In her Author’s Note at the end of the book Sepetys says, “It’s estimated that one in every ten citizens provided information.” All of these spies and informers generated thousands and thousands of pages of reports on the daily activities of every citizen, and each page added to “Romania’s perpetual sense of surveillance.”
This story is one that needs to be told, needs to be repeated. I see and hear people in the United States and in Europe flirting with communism, calling themselves “Marxists” or “socialists.” They think that such ideas are “just a better economic system”, that they won’t lead to tyranny or to a cult of charismatic leadership or to poverty and slavery. But everywhere—Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Vietnam, East Germany, and Romania—that’s exactly what communism has produced, has been used to produce. And the stories needs to be told again and again, both as cautionary tales and as a monument to the very real people who suffered under the horror and brutality of life in what was meant to be “just a better economic system.”
Cristian and his friend Luca and his girlfriend Liliana live through the fall of Ceausescu and his regime, but the story doesn’t really have a happy ending. Communism didn’t end in Romania until fifteen years after the death of the Ceausescu’s. And there are still many unanswered questions about what exactly happened in Romania during the rule of communism: who killed whom, and who gave the orders, and who benefitted and how it all came to be. All of the answers to these questions are perhaps buried in tons of records and files and reports, or perhaps just buried, destroyed. I Must Betray You is one attempt to illuminate through story what it felt like and what it required to live in a certain time and place, Bucharest, Romania, 1989 under the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.
First there are the re-reads: Hannah Coulter, That Hideous Strength, and Mansfield Park. Hannah Coulter was just as good as I remembered it. This fictional memoir of an old woman remembering her life and the lives of her children made me think about my grown children and how their lives have taken such different turns and directions from what I expected. Russell Moore writes about “why you should read Hannah Coulter”, and I second his motion.
“Most people now are looking for a ‘better place’, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. . . . There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. and it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it, and keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven.”
~Hannah Coulter, p. 83
I re-read all three of Lewis’s space trilogy books this year: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. I must say that I enjoyed That Hideous Strength the most of the three, whereas previously I thought Perelandra was my favorite. That Hideous Strength is just so prophetic. How did Lewis know that men and women would become so confused about gender roles or that mixing Christianese (talk) with pagan concepts would become such a problem? Or that many would move past naturalistic materialism straight into the occult? Just like 1984 by George Orwell, which I understand was written partially as a response to Lewis’s book, That Hideous Strength is full of images and ideas that speak directly to today’s issues: the manipulation of the press/media, police brutality and accountability, psychological techniques used for rehabilitation, crime and punishment, education, gender roles, procreation or the lack thereof, and much more. I read That Hideous Strength with Cindy Rollins’ Patreon group, and we had lots of good discussion about all of these ideas.
The Death of Ivan Ilych and Reunion were two more books I read along with the Literary Life podcast folks (Angelina Stanford, Thomas Brooks, and Cindy Rollins), and I’m sure I enjoyed them extra-specially because of the podcast discussions. Both books are novellas, rather than full length novels, and both are well worth your time.
“He felt that he was trapped in such a mesh of lies that it was difficult to make sense out of anything. Everything she did for him was done strictly for her sake; and she told him she was doing for her sake what she actually was, making this seem so incredible that he was bound to take it to mean just the reverse.”
~The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham was a book read back in February, about a woman torn between fidelity to a seemingly loveless marriage and adultery with a seemingly exciting and passionate man. The keyword is “seemingly.” I didn’t review this book, but here’s a review at Educating Petunia that includes thoughts on the movie version as well. I think I’d like to watch the movie sometime, and I was reminded of this reading project that I’d like to restart in 2022. So many projects, so little persistence.
“You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.”
~The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
Our Mutual Friend was my Dickens novel for the year, and although it’s not my favorite Dickens, any book by Dickens stands head and shoulders above the pack. I also watch duh mini-series of OMF and enjoyed that quite a bit. I plan to read Hard Times (with the Literary Life folks) and maybe re-read David Copperfield (my favorite Dickens novel) in 2022.
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.”
Our Mutual Friend, Mr. Rokesmith
I discovered Naomi Novik’s fantasy novels early in 2021, both Spinning Silver and her Temeraire series about Napoleonic era dragons and men working together to defeat Napoleon and remake the world, especially England, as a comfortable and welcoming place for friendly working dragons. These book are just fun, and if you like adult fantasy, with some non-explicit hanky-panky going on (not the focus of the novels), then I recommend these.
I also read Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive trilogy in early 2021 while I was coughing with Covid, beginning with The Way of Kings. It was good, absorbing, with lots of good character development and plot twists that I didn’t see coming. This author is so prolific, more than thirty, mostly huge, sprawling novels published, that I will never read all of his books, but I may dip back in again to his Cosmere (fantasy world), from time to time. The following quote was particularly timely:
“There are worse things . . . than a disease. When you have one, it reminds you that you’re alive. Makes you fight for what you have. When the disease has run its course, normal healthy life seems wonderful by comparison.”
Brightness Shallon in The Way of Kings, p. 506
Fanny Price and Mansfield Park. I knew I had read Mansfield Park before, but all I could remember was the play-within-a-novel that turns into a disaster. I initially found both the book and the protagonist somewhat lackluster and plodding, but the more I read, and the more I listened to The Literary Life podcast episodes about the book, the more I grew to love Fanny. I can only aspire to the humility and servanthood that she exemplifies. (Aspiring to humility is something of an oxymoron, but it actually makes sense in a Chestertonian sort of way.) Anyway, I would like to be able to keep my mouth shut more often as Fanny does and to think of myself less and others more. I think that sort of attitude comes by practice, though, and it’s hard to be willing to practice humility.
So, what are the themes that emerge from all this fictional reading? Endure hardship patiently. And brighten the corner where you are. If I could learn these two lessons, deep in my soul, by means of story or situational experience, I’d be, well, certainly better, farther along the path to virtue. Not that I read to become virtuous, but stories do seep into the soul.
What fiction formed your life in 2021? What novel(s) will you be reading in 2022?
Eric P. Kelly‘s historical novel, The Trumpeter of Krakow, won the Newbery Medal in 1929. At the Sign of the Golden Compass was published ten years later in 1938, and it has a lot in common with Mr. Kelly’s earlier award-winning novel. Although Golden Compass begins in London in 1576 with the nineteen year old printer’s apprentice Godfrey Ingram being accused of crime he didn’t commit, the main setting is the European continent, specifically the city of Antwerp, Belgium. Spain and Holland are at war, and rebellious and undisciplined Spanish troops are quartered in the Flemish city of Antwerp, threatening violence and pillage to the citizens of the city at any time. Or perhaps the Dutch troop will fight the Spanish in the very heart of the city itself.
Godfrey Ingram, after fleeing to Antwerp, finds himself in the middle of not only a war between the Spanish and the Dutch, but also an intellectual battle between medieval astrologers, sorcerers, and assorted fakirs who fear the spread of knowledge and of literacy and the progressive printers, authors and translators who are working to educate and illuminate by the power of the written word and the printing press. Godfrey finds sanctuary and begins work at the printshop of Christopher Plantin, who is memorialized at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp to this day. Other actual historical characters who make an appearance in the novel are philosopher Justus Lipsius, Governor of Antwerp Champagney, Phillip II of Spain, and the painter Peter Paul Rubens.
The central antagonist in the novel is a famous astrologer and sorcerer (as in The Trumpeter of Krakow), and the book shows the controversy between the new ideas brought to the public by means of the printing press and the old superstitions that held men in bondage before the advent of mass printing. In fact the two main characters, Godfrey Ingram and Christopher Plantin, discuss the allure and power of printing toward the end of the book:
“I would far rather be a master craftsman in this trade than posses a doctor’s gown. Yea, I would rather print fine books than own a hundred ships that bore treasures from the Americas or the East.”
The Master’s eyes brightened. “You have it, too,” he said. “The fatal fascination of the press. I sometimes think that ink is a curse, that it lures men on when nothing else in this life interests them. I, indeed, am one such, caught in this folly. Yet, I would not have it otherwise. Write, I cannot. The gift of words has not been given me. But I have the desire, the madness–call it what you will–to print the words of others. To keep alive in the world the thought of thinking men, to spread abroad ideas that enliven and elevate.”
p.189-190
Eric P. Kelly’s style of writing is somewhat florid and overly dramatic; however, he is dealing with dramatic events: the rise of the printing press, the evil of deviltry and superstition, and the sack of Antwerp in 1576, also called the Spanish Fury and known as the greatest massacre in Belgian history. If you’ve read The Trumpeter of Krakow, the style of writing in this book is much the same as in that earlier book. It was off-putting at first, but as I persisted, I became quite engaged in the narrative. It’s not a time or series of events in history that I knew anything about, and I’m glad to have read about it in Mr. Kelly’s book.
I just finished reading Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser, and although I think the biographer has some underlying assumptions and biases about politics and history that I would not agree with, I still recommend the book. I thought it quite insightful, and it provided background and details that I did not know before about Ms. Wilder’s life.
The book spends as much time on the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s only surviving child, Rose Lane Wilder, as it does on Laura’s life. Perhaps because their lives were so intertwined, the daughter and the mother come across as enmeshed in a somewhat dysfunctional relationship that nevertheless produced several wonderful and classic books. In spite of Rose’s mostly negative influence, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s philosophy of life shines through the books. Garth Williams, the second and most famous illustrator of the Little House books, wrote this about Ms. Wilder after meeting her on her farm in Missouri:
She understood the meaning of hardship and struggle, of joy and work, of shyness and bravery. She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.
Prairie Fires, p. 263-264
The same could not be said for her daughter.
In fact, even though I read A Wilder Rose: Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and their Little Houses by Susan Wittig Albert, a fictionalized account of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose and their somewhat stormy collaboration in writing the Little House books, and I knew that Rose was a difficult person, I didn’t really realize how very unstable she was. Fraser blames Rose’s outbursts and tantrums and trail of broken relationships on childhood trauma and possible mental illness. However, the childhood trauma rationale seems like an excuse rather than a reason. Laura Ingalls Wilder, the mother, endured much more and much worse than Rose ever did, and Laura, while not a perfect person, was certainly more mentally stable and plain likable than Rose ever was.
So, partly because of what I read in this biography, I am considering removing the two books (of three that he wrote) that I have in my library by Roger Lea MacBride, fictionalized sequels to the Little House books about Rose Wilder Lane’s childhood in Missouri. MacBride was Rose Wilder Lane’s protege and heir, and he seems to have been something of a sycophant and a leech. I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with his books, but I also don’t know that they are worth keeping. Perhaps I should pass them on to someone else. I haven’t read the books by MacBride, and since people occasionally ask for them and I got them donated, I added them to the library. But now, I’m wondering. Has anyone here read the MacBride books? Are they well written? Worth keeping?
I also developed a great taste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: Quo Vadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur. It might be expected that this arose out of my new concern for my religion, but I think not. Early Christians came into many of these stories, but they were not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas, slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheatres; the attraction, as I now see, was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. And they were mostly, as literature, rather bad books.
~C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
I’m not sure what Lewis meant by “erotic”. Perhaps he simply meant sensationalist or appealing to the emotions. I’m not at all sure any of these novels could be called erotic in the same sense as 50 Shades of Grey is erotic, but perhaps I’m not picking up on some nuance of the definition of the word. At any rate, C.S. Lewis didn’t think The Darkness and the Dawn was a terribly good book, and I tend to agree with him. But still, it was an interesting look at a time and a place about which there is very little historical fiction to be read.
The book features horses, battles, Roman legions, Attila the Hun, a girl with golden hair, and a hero who fights to win her. If it reminded me of anything I had read before, it was Stephen Lawhead’s Byzantium, a book with many of the same themes and a similar setting (Europe, Dark Ages) minus Attila aka the Scourge of God. There’s a lot scheming, political plotting, battles, narrow escapes, rebellion, and romance as well as all of the things that Lewis mentions as attractions for his teenage reading life.
The Romans are predictably decadent and ripe for being conquered. Attila is portrayed as a shrewd but barbaric and harsh king, out to conquer the world and subject all men to his bidding. (As an aside, I don’t really understand why power is such an addictive narcotic. Why did Attila, Alexander, Julius Caesar and countless others want to rule the world? Why doesn’t Donald Trump just resign? I think I would just quit at some point, but maybe that’s because I’ve never had enough power for it to go to my head.)
Nicolan, the hero of the story, begins as the son of a back country horse breeder, is sold into slavery, and becomes the trusted and gifted advisor to Attila himself. At a critical juncture in the story, Nicolan embraces his Christian heritage and struggles with what that commitment means to his desire for revenge and his place as a military advisor. If you have ” a taste for all the fiction . . . about the ancient world,” you could do worse than pick up The Darkness and the Dawn, not an enduring classic literary novel, but a decent read nevertheless. And it’s not really “erotic” so don’t go in expecting that.
Janna is proud of her membership in the Hitler Youth. She’s proud of her parents, famous actors, who have left Janna in Germany while they tour and entertain the troops of the Reich. Janna is also proud of having been chosen to play Brunhilde in the upcoming play that her youth group is going to perform, the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde from Hitler’s favorite opera by Wagner. Most of all, Janna is proud to be German and Aryan, and not a member of those inferior Jewish or Slavic races.
The Borrowed House is a young adult story, not because it’s about a teenager; Janna is only twelve years old in the book. And it’s not YA because of explicit sex or even violence, although there is some of the latter as the author describes the violence against Jews and others in Holland where Janna goes to join her parents. The Borrowed House is YA because it deals with mature themes of racism and indoctrination and trust and adultery in a way that is nuanced and complicated and respectful of the maturity of its audience. Janna is an unusual twelve year old, and she sees and understands things that most twelve year olds wouldn’t even think about. And there is a developing romance between twelve year old Janna and an older resident of the borrowed house that Janna and her parents live in. Nothing explicit or illicit, but the romantic subtext is there.
Maybe you should read this one yourself before handing it to your child, because first of all, it won’t be the right book for every young person. And secondly, The Borrowed House is one of those rare novels that adults can appreciate just as well as teens can. The book gives a lot insight into the way the German civilians looked at the war and at Herr Hitler as well as the privations and persecution and courage of the Dutch and Jewish people in Holland during World War II.
Republished by Purple House Press in 2016, this World War II novel is an excellent story and a definite discussion starter. Just think carefully about who would appreciate it properly and at what age.The writing and subject matter and characterization remind me a little bit of Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult novels. If you’ve read and enjoyed A Winter’s Love or The Small Rain by L’Engle, then The Borrowed House has about the same maturity level with some similar themes.
