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Bletchley Park Books for Teens

Nov8

The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II by Candace Fleming.

The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin.

Bletchley Park and the code breakers who lived and worked there during World War II are hot topics these days. Maybe it’s because the whole episode is less “mined” because of all the secrecy that surrounded the work there. Maybe it’s just a fleeting trend. At any rate, there do seem to be a lot of books about Bletchley floating around, but not so many for the younger set. Until now.

These two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, were recently published (2024) and are appropriate for young people about 13 years of age and up. The Enigma Girls tells the story of several teenaged girls who were recruited to work at Bletchley either because of their math skills or their language proficiency. But these girls were not, for the most part, doing the high level code breaking that was the most intriguing and intellectually challenging work going on at Bletchley Park. Rather, they were keeping records on notecards of all of the code words and German double speak that had been decoded. Or they were servicing and keeping the huge “bombes” running. These were the machines that were created to infiltrate and determine the settings for the German Enigma coding machines. Machines (or primitive computers) were fighting machines, and teenagers were keeping the machines moving and computing.

By limiting her story to the females who worked at Bletchley, gifted nonfiction author Candace Fleming risks over-emphasizing and even distorting the role that these women and girls played in the overall mission of breaking and intercepting the Nazi communications. But she doesn’t fall into that trap, and instead as I read I was moved to admire the persistence and hard work of these unsung heroines who toiled in harsh conditions doing work that they were unable to discuss or even understand completely. It wasn’t a romantic, spy-novel kind of job. The “bombes” were huge, oily, and loud, and the girls who tended them knew very little about how they worked or what significance their work might have. And after the war was over, the Enigma Girls were still left in the dark about how their work helped England win the war because they and everyone else who worked with them were bound to secrecy by the Official Secrets Acts that they all had to sign. They only knew that they were needed to “do their part” in defeating Hitler—and they did.

The Bletchley Riddle, although it is “based on the real history of Bletchley Park, Britain’s top-secret World War II codebreaking center,” makes the whole setting and story much more exciting and romantic. (Fiction can do that.) Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin, both well known in YA literature circles, wrote this spy novel together, and the joint authorship shows. It’s a bit disjointed at times, but the two authors do tie up most all of the loose ends by the end of the story. Fourteen year old Lizzie Novis has lost her mother, Willa, a single parent who works for the U.S. Embassy in London. Willa went to Poland to help evacuate tens of U.S. Embassy there in anticipation of the Nazi invasion of Warsaw. And she didn’t come back. Everyone says that Willa is dead, that she most likely died in the invasion. But Lizzie is sure that Willa is still alive, and she’s determined to find her mother no matter what it takes.

I’ll let you read to find out how Lizzie ends up in Bletchley, with several hurried trips back to London. I’ll let you read about Lizzie’s older brother Jakob, and how he becomes the other major character in the story. And finally in the pages of the book, you can meet Lizzie’s new friends, Marion and Colin, and read about a little harmless romance that springs up as they all try to keep up with the irrepressible Lizzie and her quest to find Willa. It’s a book about lying and spying and secret-keeping and persistence in a time and place where all of those qualities, even the dishonesty, are necessary for survival.

But the story never becomes too thoughtful or deep. It’s barely believable that Lizzie can get away with all of the shenanigans that she pulls. And Jakob seems too befuddled to be as intelligent as he’s supposed to be. Maybe he’s a bit of an absent-minded professor at the ripe age of nineteen. Anyway, it’s a lark, but not to be taken seriously. And the minor characters—Alan Turing, Dilly Knox, Gordon Welchman—as well as the setting provide a good introduction to Bletchley Park and its importance to the British war effort and eventual victory.

I recommend both books for those teens who are interested in World War II and Bletchley Park and codes and codebreaking. Oh, both books spend a fair amount time talking about codes and ciphers and Enigma and how it worked and how the Enigma code was broken? Or deciphered? I can never keep the difference straight in my head between codes and ciphers, much decode or decipher anything. But you may have better skills than I do.

The Night War by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Jun11

I’ve read and reviewed a few other books by contemporary middle grade and young adult author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley:

I’ve also read, but not reviewed, The War That Saved My Life and The War I Finally Won. Ms. Bradley tends to write about several topics and settings: World War II Europe, France in particular, Catholicism and religion, abused children, children with disabilities. The Night War is a Jewish Holocaust story set in France, 1942. When Miri (Miriam), a twelve year old Jewish girl, and her parents are routed from their apartment in Paris by the French police and herded onto buses to be taken to the Velodrome d’Hiver, Miri becomes separated from her family but she given the responsibility of escaping with and caring for her two year old neighbor, Nora Rosenbaum. Mrs. Rosenbaum tells Miri to run, to take Nora, and to somehow try to get to Switzerland. And Miri is faced with a choice, the first of many impossible choices: will she try to find her parents in the Velodrome or escape with Nora?

Miri chooses to run, and with the help of a French nun, she manages to get away from the Nazi roundup of Jews in Paris. Eventually, Miri, who takes the name of Marie, and Nora end up in Chenonceaux, near the castle of Chenonceau, which was long ago the dwelling of Diane de Poitiers and subsequently, Catherine de Medici. These women and their history become a significant part of Miri/Marie’s story. (SPOILER WARNING: Here be ghosts and ghost-like characters.)

And so do the nuns of Chenonceaux. Marie is hidden in a convent school, and she again is faced with choices. Does she stay in relative safety in the school, or does she attempt to take Nora and flee to Vichy France and then on to Switzerland? Is Nora safer with her foster family, or is she in danger of forgetting her family and her Jewish heritage? Can Miri pretend to be Catholic and still pray to God in her own Jewish way? And there are other choices to be made as Marie stumbles upon a secret resistance network and is asked to help smuggle others out of Nazi-controlled France.

This story with its emphasis on personal responsibility and making good choices, and the consequences of bad choices, is an excellent one for middle grade readers who are just waking up to their own responsibilities and moral choices in life. Recommended for readers age 10 and up, or as soon as you think your reader is ready for hard things about the Holocaust and the evil that people do. Not graphic.

When the Sky Falls by Phil Earle

Mar31

2022 Middle Grade Fiction: When the Sky Falls by Phil Earle.

I received a review copy of this book, originally published in Great Britain in 2021, and scheduled for publication in April of 2022 in the U.S. The tagline on the front of my ARC says, “Friendship can come from unexpected places,” and that line does summarize at least one of the themes of this story. In 1940, with his parents unavailable and his grandmother unable to control him, twelve year old Joseph Palmer isn’t to London (instead of being evacuated out of the city) to live with his grandmother’s old friend, Mrs. F.

Joseph is filled with anger, rebellious and quick to take offense from the hurts he has sustained in his short life. When he finds out that Mrs. F. is the sole proprietor of a run-down, war torn zoo in the heart of the city, with most of the animals either sent away or barely surviving, Joseph is even more confused and angry with his grandmother for sending him away, with his father for leaving to go to war, with Mrs. F. for her unyielding personality, with the whole world and the war and “Herr Hitler” and just about everything else, including the silver back gorilla called Adonis.

Joseph continues throughout most of the book to be a prickly and rage-filled character, although we do learn some of the underlying reasons for Joseph’s anger and inability to trust. And just as Adonis is not a tame gorilla (there is no such thing), Joseph is not so much tamed as educated, learning that his impulsive anger and rage do not really serve him well as he navigates the city and the zoo during a war that takes and takes and takes away all that is good and hopeful. Mrs. F. says, at one point in the story, “I hate this war. All of it. All it does is take.”

The story is good. Joseph does grow and learn over the course of the book, in a believable story arc that ultimately ends in both tragedy and hope. But . . . the writing and the details felt a little off in some way. Rough. There’s some language, using God’s name in vain and a few curses sprinkled through, but that wasn’t the real problem. Joseph nurses his rage and anger over and over, and I just couldn’t see where it went, what it really was that redeemed him or relieved him of his fear and hatred. Mrs. F. says more than once that there’s something good deep down inside Joseph. Joseph and Adonis do form a connection, or perhaps even a friendship. And the friendship and loyalty of Mrs. F. and others with whom Joseph lives and works become important to him.

Nevertheless, even with a “four years later” epilogue chapter at the end, the story felt unresolved. I think it would be absolutely traumatizing for animal lovers in the younger end of the middle grades. Joseph’s age, twelve, is a good minimum age for reading this harrowing, but somewhat hopeful, tale. It is a war story, and maybe it would be helpful for middle grade and young adult readers who are having to deal with the horrors of war, at least in the news, again, in Ukraine and elsewhere.

I’m ambivalent. It’s certainly not James Herriot and All Creatures Great and Small, but it might resonate with readers who need something a bit more grim and gritty, but still with a glimmer of hope.

Village of Scoundrels by Margi Preus

Sep1

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loiredepartment in south-central France. Residents have been primarily Huguenot or Protestant since the 17th century. During World War II these Huguenot residents made the commune a haven for Jews fleeing from the Nazis. They hid them both within the town and countryside, and helped them flee to neutral Switzerland. In 1990 the town was one of two collectively honored as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel for saving Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

~Wikipedia

Village of Scoundrels is a fictional depiction of the activities of the villagers of Le Chambon during World War 2, especially the teens and children who were either refugees or resistors or both. The book doesn’t really have a clearly defined protagonist, but some of the heroes and villains in the books are listed in the opening pages, and these characters are mostly based on the lives and actions of real, living people:

  • Celeste is a high school student who becomes a courier for the Resistance.
  • Jean-Paul is a Jewish teen who wants to become a doctor, but who find that his talent for forgery is in demand.
  • Jules the Scoundrel is a ten year old goatherd who plays dangerous games with the French policeman who is collaborating with the Nazis to uncover the secrets of Le Chambon.
  • Henni and Max are German Jews, boyfriend and girlfriend, who take refuge in Le Chambon.
  • Philippe, a high school student from Normandy, hides refugees and smuggles them to Switzerland.

This book is gaining lots of accolades this year, and indeed the subject matter cries out for a good novelization or narrative nonfiction telling (maybe there is a good nonfiction book about this WWII event?). However, the mix of fiction and nonfiction in this one was not that well done. It should have either been more fictionalized to make the story flow with a clear protagonist and plot or just straight nonfiction with chapters telling the stories of each of the various children and young adults who were active in the French Resistance in Le Chambon. I found it interesting, but hard to follow.

The last part of the novel, where the story coalesces around the French policeman, Perdant, and Jules the Soundrel, is pure fiction and better reading than the rest of the book. Then, the afterword attempts to help the reader sort fact from fiction, but I found it just as confusing as the preceding chapters. Again, can anyone recommend a well written nonfiction book on this subject? Preus provides a bibliography of twenty or more titles at the end of the book, but which one is the best?

Twentieth Century Caesar: Benito Mussolini by Jules Archer

Oct22

Jules Archer wrote several of the biographies in the Messner Shelf of Biographies series, including this one about the infamous dictator who led Italy into the second World War and dragged the Italian people into his own personal downfall as he became Hitler’s puppet.

“Benito Mussolini was a man of many contradictions but with one driving ambition—to rule Italy and restore it to the power and splendor of the ancient Roman Empire, with himself as the new Caesar. In time he became the founder of the Fascist movement and dictator of all of Italy—but at what a price!”

So, it was Mussolini’s dream to Make Italy Great Again, but MIGA doesn’t sound quite as strong as MAGA. And Benito Mussolini was no Julius Caesar. He was instead the son of a poor blacksmith who abused his children both physically and verbally. Mussolini’s father taught him to be a socialist and a populist. He became a journalist who advocated violence and who led the Italians into World War I on the Allied side as a result of a bribe from the French. While he was exiled to Switzerland, Mussolini fell under the influence of Communist Angelika Balabanoff, a comrade of Lenin and of Trotsky. She taught him to bathe and to study languages and communism.

I really wanted to understand WHY the Italians followed Il Duce, the name Mussolini took for himself after his rise to power. How did an entire nation of people become enamored of a boor who blustered and incited, even commanded, violence from his own army of Blackshirts and who went from being a power broker before World War 2 to a powerless sycophant who dependent on the sometimes good will of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine?

I hope that the difference between early twentieth century Italy and present day United States is that America has a proud heritage of resistance to dictatorship and government overreach. Italy looked back to the glory days of the Caesars and longed for someone to come and put things right, even at the cost of individual liberty. I pray that we Americans as a people continue to want government to leave us alone and let us make our own lives right, with government providing only a safe and stable environment for us to do so. As I hear more and more about socialist envy and making America great, I wonder if we could be doomed to repeat, in a uniquely American way, the fantastic blunders of fascist Italy. I certainly pray not.

Archer’s other Messner biographies:

African Firebrand: Kenyatta of Kenya
Angry Abolitionist: William Lloyd Garrison
Battlefield President: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Famous Young Rebels
Colossus of Europe: Metternich
Fighting Journalist: Horace Greeley
Front-Line General: Douglas MacArthur
Man of Steel: Joseph Stalin
Red Rebel: Tito of Yugoslavia
Science Explorer: Roy Chapman Andrews
Strikes, Bombs & Bullets: Big Bill Haywood and the IWW
Trotsky: World Revolutionary
World Citizen: Woodrow Wilson

Archer seems to have been particularly interested in rebels, revolutionaries, strongmen and dictators. I wonder whom he might write about if he were still writing?

Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides

Sep2

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission by Hampton Sides.

Ghost Soldiers is a well-written and engrossing narrative history of the rescue of 513 American and British POWs from the Japanese prison camp of Cabanatuan in the Philippines. The soldiers imprisoned at Cabanatuan at the time of the rescue (January, 1945) were mostly survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March, survivors who were barely surviving since most of the somewhat healthier prisoners had already been transferred to Japan in anticipation of the Americans retaking of the Philippine Islands. This who were left at Cabanatuan were diseased, injured, and in a very precarious situation—not quite liberated, still under Japanese control, and dispensable because of their lack of usefulness as workers for the Japanese. There were indeed rumors of and precedent for a Japanese massacre of all the prisoners left at the camp as the Japanese retreated before the advancing U.S. armed forces.

The U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion was tasked with the mission of rescuing these prisoners of Cabanatuan from behind Japanese lines in January, 1945. The mission had to be done secretly and quickly. No one knew how long the prisoners would remain alive to be rescued. And the Rangers were a new and untried group of elite “commandos”, sort of an experiment. Would they be able to find the prisoners and bring them out before the Japanese army stopped them?

So, Mr. Sides, a journalist and author, has grabbed onto a great story. And it’s one I had never read about before, although I had read some things about Bataan (The Jersey Brothers by Sally Mott Freeman, We Band of Angels by Elizabeth Norman). He tells the story from alternating points of view, that of the Army Rangers who were sent to rescue the prisoners and that of the prisoners themselves who struggled with feelings of hopelessness and abandonment in addition to the physical deprivations and tortures of their ordeal. This way of telling the story works to increase the suspense as the two stories merge into the climactic scene of the Rescue.

One of the interesting things about this story was meeting unexpected heroes that I would like to read more about. Chaplain Robert Taylor, one of the prisoners who was selected to go to Japan just before the rescue took place, ended up on the ill-fated ship, Oryoku Maru, a hellish prison ship that was sunk off the coast of Bataan by the U.S. Navy. Taylor survived, went on another ship which was also disabled by U.S. bombers, finally was sent to Manchuria, survived his imprisonment there, and eventually after his return home became the highest ranking chaplain in the U.S. Armed Forces. Days of Anguish, Days of Hope by Billy Keith is a biography of Chaplain Taylor that I would like to read.

Then, among the 6th Ranger battalion, I encountered Dr. James Canfield Fisher, son of the famous author Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Captain James Fisher was a surgeon assigned to the Ranger battalion that freed Cabanatuan, and he insisted on going with his men up to very gates of the prison camp in order to be available to treat those who might be wounded in the attempted rescue. His story is all the more intriguing and poignant for me since I know of his mother and her books, including the classic Understood Betsy. Who knew that reading about World War II in the Philippines could circle around to connect back to children’s literature?

I recommend Ghost Soldiers to readers who are interested in reading about World War II adventures, the War in the Pacific, stories of courage and endurance, and just good narrative nonfiction. (If you liked Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand or Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff . . .) I found it to be fascinating and inspiring.

A Place To Belong by Cynthia Kadohata

Aug5

To be honest, I am tired of reading children’s books about the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. I know that it’s important to remember the injustice that was done to Japanese Americans during that time. I know that the story and the information are new to new generations of children. I know that everyone’s story deserves to be told, either fictionalized for the sake of privacy or as biography or memoir, and I know that survivors of injustice deserve to be heard. Nevertheless, I’ve read this book by Sandra Dallas and this one by Kirby Larson and Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Houston and Journey to Topaz by Yoshiko Uchida and Paper Wishes by Lois Sepahban and Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki and The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559, Mirror Lake Internment Camp by Barry Denenberg and . . . many more. I thought that this new middle grade fiction book by Cynthia Kadohata would have nothing new to say about this disgraceful episode in American history, but I expected it to be well written by Newbery award-winning author Kadohata.

And it was, well written and surprisingly engaging and informative. I knew that many Japanese internees decided to prove their loyalty to the United States, despite the way they had been treated, by enlisting and serving in the U.S. military. I didn’t know that up to six thousand others decided that there was no place for them in the United States immediately after the war, and so they renounced their U.S. citizenship and were returned to Japan. A Place To Belong is the story of one family who “went back” to a country that most of them had never visited in the first place.

The story is told from the perspective of twelve year old Hanako. She and her father and mother and her little brother Akira are on a boat bound for Japan. There they plan to stay with Hanako’s father’s parents, her grandparents, on a farm near Hiroshima. First, however, the train that they board in Japan goes through the ruins of Hiroshima itself, and that’s a tragic and sobering scene that sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Post-war Japan really has no place for Hanako’s family either, even though Hanako’s grandparents turn out to be the most gracious and loving grandparents a girl could want.

The grandparents, Hanako’s parents, Hanako herself, Akira who is “a strange little creature” (maybe autistic?), and the other characters who enter into the story are all drawn with loving care by a talented author. I learned a lot about Japanese history and culture, and I never felt as if I were being taught a lesson or preached a sermon on the evils of imperialistic racist America. Kadohata lets the story unfold its own lessons, lessons about justice, and forgiveness, and second chances, and forming new dreams. I was charmed by the wisdom and perseverance of Hanako’s grandparents and filled with compassion for Hanako’s family and for all the families and individuals who were faced with impossible choices during and after World War II.

I think there might also be certain parallels between the story of A Place To Belong and the current refugee/immigrant crisis at the Mexican/American border, but I haven’t completely teased those out in my mind. Suffice it to say that today’s refugees are often looking for a place to belong, too. And Americans would do well to look at their situation from their perspective if possible and show compassion for people making hard choices.

Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan

Feb25

The problem with a historical novel that is “based on the true story of a forgotten hero” is that the reader is left wondering how much of the story is fiction and how much is fact. Especially when the protagonist of the novel is a World War II hero, which is relatively recent history. If a historical novel is about Cleopatra or Marco Polo, one can assume that most of the dialog and much of the action is made up while the timeline is essentially accurate, if the author did his research. But with a more recent figure and time period, a book about someone who actually gave extensive interviews to Mr. Sullivan, it’s harder to separate fact from fiction. And if I’m reading about a “forgotten hero” like Pino Lella, I can’t even scramble for a biography to fact check as I could with Winston Churchill or General Patton, fo examples.

However, despite the fact that my thoughts persisted in returning to the question of whether this or that episode in the novel “really happened” or really happened the way it was portrayed in the novel, I did enjoy this World War II tale set in northern Italy, mostly Milan, during the last gasps of the war, 1943-1945. The book raises the questions of what makes a hero and what defines a traitor. If you do something to fight against evil, but you don’t do everything you could do because that would cost you your life, is it enough? What if you do some good in the midst of great evil only as a means of hedging your bets? When is action in the face of overwhelming force, honorable and courageous, and when does it become merely quixotic and foolish?

I have read and watched other books and movies about the war in Italy. The following are the most memorable:

My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes is a documentary about heroes of the struggle against Facism and Nazi Germany in Italy during World War II, particularly about some of those who rescued Jews from the Germans. I thought it was quite illuminating. The documentary features world class cyclist Gino Bartali, who secretly worked for the Italian underground during the war. (In Beneath a Scarlet Sky, Pino Lella learns to drive from Alberto Ascari, a race car driver who went on to become a Formula One World Champion after the war.)

A Bell for Adano by John Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. It’s about Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian American officer in the U.S. army who was “more or less the American mayor after our invasion” of Adano a small village in Sicily.

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell. This novel is set in Northern Italy during the last year of World War II.

These I haven’t read, but they look interesting:

Twentieth Century Caesar: Benito Mussolini by Jules Archer. A Messner biography.

Road to Valor: A True Story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation by Aili McConnon. About Gino Bartali, the cyclist/hero.

The Brave Cyclist: The True Story of a Holocaust Hero by Amalia Hoffman and Chiara Fedele. A picture book biography of Bartali.

Born on This Day: Erik Christian Haugaard, 1923-2009

Apr13

Born on April 13, 1923 in Denmark, Erik Christian Haugaard eventually made his way to the United States and became a writer, even though he left school at the age of fifteen and left Denmark at the age of seventeen. When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, young Erik Haugaard got out of Denmark just ahead of the invasion on the last ship out of Danish waters to the United States. After that he traveled some in the U.S., joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, went to college some during and after the war was over, and then began to write. An editor at Houghton Mifflin suggested that he rewrite a manuscript he had submitted and make it into a story for children. And so he wrote his first book for children, Hakon of Rogen’s Saga, a novel about the medieval ruler, Earl Hakon of Norway.

I have five of Haugaard’s thirteen or so books in my library:

Hakon of Rogen’s Saga and A Slave’s Tale are both set in Viking times, after the Christianization of Norway, but in a time when the pagan gods and customs were still in conflict with the new Christian way of looking at life. Leif the Unlucky, also set among the Vikings, is a fictionalized look at the Greenland colony of Lief Ericksson, an attempt at nation-building that did not turn out well.

Orphans of the Wind is a U.S. civil war sailing story. Haugaard’s books tend to be about young boys or girls getting caught up in the dangers and travails of war.

The Samurai’s Tale is one of three books that Haugaard wrote about ancient Japan and the samurai. The other two (that I don’t own) are The Boy and the Samurai and The Revenge of the Forty-Seven Samurai.

Cromwell’s Boy is about a young man living during the English civil war of Oliver Cromwell’s day. It’s a sequel to the book, A Messenger for Parliament, a book that’s on my wishlist.

The Little Fishes, another war story that I do not own, is set in occupied Italy with a twelve year old orphaned beggar named Guido as the protagonist.

The Haugaard book that I most recently acquired and read is titled Chase Me, Catch Nobody. Set in pre-war Germany and Denmark, Chase Me, Catch Nobody features a fourteen year old Danish schoolboy who must be at least a semi-autobiographical character. Erik Hansen (not Haugaard) narrates this story of a school trip to Nazi Germany in 1937. Erik in the book describes himself in much the same way that author Erik Haugaard reminisces about his younger self in a 1979 interview I read. Erik Haugaard the author and Erik Hansen the character are both from upper middle class backgrounds, indifferent students, ambitious to write poetry, and as adolescents “a bit of a snob.” Haugaard says in the interview that even as an adult writer what he most needs and craves from an editor is praise, praise, and more praise. Erik Hansen is self-aware enough to know and tell the reader that he is somewhat ashamed of his parents and their “lack of imagination” and middle class values, but that he enjoys being wealthy and generous just like his father and that he and his father indeed share share many of the same faults, “which is why we didn’t get along.”

I thought the book, rated YA for some fumbling talk about sex and for the very adolescent attitudes expressed in story, was very insightful as the characters, mostly Erik and his friend Nikolai, gained more and more insight into their own characters and their own ability to act with courage and conviction. The boys are tested by an encounter with a stranger in a grey raincoat who entrusts Erik with a mysterious package to deliver just before the man is arrested by the Gestapo. Then, later in the book, Erik and Nikolai are given another mission to complete that will require them to face great danger in order to possibly save a life. And through the book while Erik and his friend act with courage and determination, they are also typical teens, idealistic, sarcastic, foolhardy, convinced of their own invincibility and at the same time vulnerable and unsure of their own beliefs and convictions.

I was reminded of this book, The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club by Phillip Hoose, and I think these two books would be quite a good pair to read in tandem for a teen book club or discussion group. I wrote that The Boys Who Challenged Hitler was “an interesting and exciting portrait of youthful zeal and even foolhardiness which can sometimes trump an adult over-abundance of caution and planning” and the same could be said of Chase Me, Catch Nobody. But the discussion could also cover the possibility that such youthful enthusiasm and lack of respect for possible consequences or for the sheer enormity of the evil that was Naziism could bring many lives to ruin, as it indeed did in some places and situations in the Allied resistance during World War II.

I recommend Haugaard’s books for young adult readers who enjoy a challenging story that will cause them to think about character and philosophy and politics and see these subjects through the eyes of different people from themselves. However, as Haugaard says in the afore-mentioned interview it is much easier to see what’s wrong with the world than it is to see what’s right or to find solutions to the problems. Perhaps just seeing today’s political and social problems in a different historical setting such as medieval Japan or a Viking colony in Greenland will make us see those issues in a new way and begin to understand the path toward new solutions.

Erik Christian Haugaard also made his own translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, published by Doubleday as A Complete Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson, translated by Erik Christian Haugaard. The translation project took Haugaard three years to finish.

“I don’t know whether my own books will survive, but if I have saved any of Andersen’s stories from obscurity, I have made a contribution to English literature. Who Wouldn’t be grateful for having had such an opportunity!” ~Erik Christian Haugaard, interview in Language Arts, Vol. 56, No. 5 (May 1979), pp. 549-561.

Born on This Day: Eric P. Kelly, Lover of the Polish People

Mar16

Eric P. Kelly was an American newspaperman and later professor of English at Dartmouth, but his heart was with the Polish people during and after both World War I and World War II. He worked with Polish refugees after World War I, and he came to love Warsaw, writing to his mother, “Warsaw is a beautiful city, reminds me in some ways of Denver.” Then, in 1925-26, Mr. Kelly was a lecturer at a polish university in Warsaw where he heard the legend of the trumpeter of Krakow who, in 1241, was pierced by a Tartar arrow before he could finish a song called the Heyna? Mariacki (aka St. Mary’s Song or the Krakow Anthem). Ever since then, the song has always been played every hour four times from the tower of the Church of Our Lady St. Mary, but abruptly cut short before it is finished.

I’ve never managed to finish Mr. Kelly’s 1928 novel, The Trumpeter of Krakow, either, even though it won the Newbery Medal in 1929 and even though I’ve started it several times. However, I’m working on it now (again), and I’ll let you know what I think when I finish.

Eric P. Kelly also wrote the following books, a few of which I would really like to check out:

The Blacksmith of Vilno (1930) Also set in Poland, one of Kelly’s three “Polish novels.”
The Golden Star of Halicz (1931) The third of the Polish novels.
Christmas Nightingale (1932) Christmas stories of Poland, illustrated by Marguerite De Angeli.
The Girl Who Would be Queen (1934) Biography of the Countess Franciszka Corvin-Krasi?ska who lived during the 18th century in Poland and who sounds as if she might have been a fascinating person. A Polish writer of children’s literature, Klementyna Ta?ska, wrote a novel in 1825 about Countess Krasinska, The Diary of Countess Francoise Krasinska (children’s or adult?).
Three Sides of Angiochook (1935)
Treasure Mountain (1937)
At the Sign of the Golden Compass (1938) A tale of the printing house of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp, 1576.
On the Staked Plain (1940) Maybe a cowboy story?
From Star to Star (1940) A story of Krakow in 1493.
In Clean Hay (1940) Christmas story, illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham.
Land of the Polish People (1943) The Portraits of the Nations Series.
The Hand in the Picture (1947) Another fiction book set in Poland.
The Amazing Journey of David Ingram (1949) This one sounds amazing. Did you know that there was a young man, David Ingram, who claimed to have walked from Tampico, Mexico to Nova Scotia in 1568, the first European to have traveled across the continent. He also claimed to have seen silver, gold, elephants, and penguins on his journey, which makes some people doubt his story. Nevertheless, a book about the journey of David Ingram would be fun to read, I think.
Polish Legends and Tales (1971)

So, Eric P. Kelly, born March 16, 1884, died in 1960 after 33 years of teaching English at Dartmouth. The Trumpeter of Krakow was his first published book, and it remains his most well-known. If you happen to run across any of his other books, grab them for me.