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Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata and Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

Dec15


Two books set during World War War II: One takes place in California and Arizona; the other book is set on the other side of the country in North Carolina. Sumiko is twelve years old and lives with her aunt and uncle and cousins on a flower farm; Anna Fay is thirteen and has become “the man of the house” since her daddy’s gone to fight in the war. Both girls are typical older children, responsible, obligated to grow up fast and take care of younger brothers and sisters. Both girls use gardening as a way to work through their problems and challenges. And each must face her own war, her own imprisonment, and her own fight against ignorance and prejudice.

Sumiko, heroine of Weedflower, is a Japanese-American girl; her parents are dead, and she faces prejudice against “orientals” from the beginning of the story when she is dis-invited to a birthday party for a girl in her class. The challenges only get worse after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and all the residents of Japanese descent on the West Coast are gathered and sent to internment camps. Sumiko, her aunt, her two older cousins, and her little brother are sent to Poston in Arizona. There Sumiko must learn to survive and even overcome the heat, the dust, the hostility of neighbors, and even the threat of succumbing to “the ultimate boredom.” The latter is her grandfather’s term for the temptation to give up, to lose your dreams, to surrender hope, a temptation that Sumiko must face and defeat if she is to win her war.

Anna Fay, the main character in Blue has a battle to fight, too. A polio epidemic has invaded western North Carolina in 1944, and Anna Fay’s little brother Bobby falls victim to the dread disease. Later in the story, Anna Fay herself must battle polio, even as she worries about her daddy fighting Hitler in Europe and about whether her family will ever be together again. Anna Fay is trapped in the polio hospital just as Sumiko is trapped in the internment camp, and Anna Fay faces boredom and prejudice, too. The discrimination comes when Anna Fay becomes friends with a “colored girl” who also has polio, but the two girls can’t convince anyone that they should be allowed to share a hospital ward as well as a friendship.

I thought both of these books were excellently well-written. Blue goes for the tear-jerker, drama reaction; the writing in Weedflower is a little more restrained. Sumiko is the stereotypical Japanese, determined to keep her emotions under control and her tears hidden; Anna Fay is comforted by her friend’s word picture of a God who saves each person’s tears in a bottle on a heavenly window-sill. (Anna Fay’s bottle is blue.) Each girl compares herself to a flower: Sumiko is a weedflower, a flower of the field that is both beautiful and resilient; Anna Fay is sometimes as fragile as a mimosa blossom and other times as tough as wisteria.

These books would work well, paired, in a unit study on World War II to give students a good picture of different aspects of the time period. Other World War II books for girls:

Denenberg, Barry. Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941.
Denenberg, Barry. One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938.
Greene, Betty. Summer of my German Soldier.
Osborne, Mary Pope. My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, Long Island, New York, 1941.
Rinaldi, Ann. Keep Smiling Through.

Weedflower and Blue also have another thing in common; both books are nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

Dec5

This afternoon Brown Bear Daughter inhaled this story of a little Jewish girl who survived life during World War II in the Lodz ghetto, and I read it myself in one sitting a few days ago. It’s not a long read, 227 pages, and the prose text is arranged in an almost poetic form such that each page only has about a hundred words. So it doesn’t take long to read, but it does pack an emotional punch.

Ms. Roy wrote the book based on the true story of her Aunt Sylvia Perlmutter, who was one of only twelve children who survived the Lodz ghetto in Poland. If you read the introduction or know anything about the Holocaust, you know from the beginning that there are difficult things coming in this book. I hesitated to give it to my eleven year old daughter because I didn’t know how it would affect her emotionally. However, she read it, said it was a good book, and didn’t seem too disturbed. I was the one who mourned as I read for all those children who didn’t survive —and even for those who did.

The Jewish refrain in relation to the Holocaust is, “Never forget!” However, we’re always only one generation away from forgetting what horrors man can perpetrate upon other men. I don’t know what at what age a child is old enough to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, but I agree that we must not forget that “civilized” man is only one step away from barbarous acts of cruelty. And at some point even our children need to know that sin and evil are real.

They also need hope, and Jennifer Roy manages to tell a story that is filled with tragedy and yet leaves the reader with hope. As the story begins in the fall of 1939, little Sylvia is four and a half years old. On January 20, 1945, the day after she and her family are liberated from the ghetto, Sylvia celebrates her tenth birthday. By the time she is ten, Sylvia has seen and experienced things that most of us have, thankfully, only read about. She goes on to live a full life, marriage, a son, grandchildren. For over fifty years she doesn’t talk about her experiences during World War II. Finally, she tells her niece in a series of telephone interviews what she remembers of what happened to her and her family during the Holocaust.

It’s a story worth reading and remembering.

Again, this book is one of the many good books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Oct22

This was an odd book, so odd that I probably wouldn’t have managed to get very far into it if it hadn’t been recommended so highly by so many people. I’m a straightforward, A-Z, kind of gal. Give me a story that starts out “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after.” Or not happily. Tragedy is OK, too. But I like it straight and plain-spoken, or maybe poetic, but not a strange, episodic story narrated by the Grim Reaper himself.

Except I did like The Book Thief, so I’m confused. The book starts out with this comforting announcement:

* * * HERE IS A SMALL FACT * * *
You are going to die.

It ends with Death Himself beng confused and “haunted by humans.”

So, make what you will of that, and decide whether or not you want to read an odd book about Death and the Holocaust and World War II and bombs and Germany with lots of cursing, mostly in German, and lots of the aforementioned death, mostly of everybody in the book. It sounds depressing, but it’s not really. It is gritty and the tiniest bit hopeful, but not too. I can’t decide if kids will like it or not. I don’t think my kids would care for it. But some might. Or this might be the sort of book that will win lots of awards because it’s written in a different, literary sort of way and it’s about a Serious Subject, but it’s mostly loved by librarians and teachers. I can see high school teachers assigning this book in literature classes or history classes.

If I sound ambivalent, it’s because I am. Help? Someone else tell me now that I’ve read it why it was that you liked it so much.

Visit Semicolon’s Amazon Store for more great book recommendations.

A Couple of Books

Feb14

I read a couple of books while I was recuperating from the creeping crud last week, and I’m just now getting around to writing about them. The first was The God I Love by Joni Eareckson Tada. The book is basically a re-telling of Joni’s life with more emphasis on her childhood and her life after the publication of her first, very successful, attempt at spiritual autobiography, Joni, written about 30 years ago. For those who haven’t been running in evangelical circles for as long as that, Joni Tada is a beautiful Christian author and artist; she is also a quadriplegic, injured in a diving accident when she was still a teenager. Joni writes about growing up as the youngest of four daughters in a home where her father was “bigger than life.” She also remembers horseback riding and playing the piano, travel and discovering family secrets, teenage rebellion and, of course, The Accident. She gives hope to those dealing with depression by telling about her own bouts with depression and anxiety. And she ends the book with a statement of purpose:

“Ah, this is the God I love. The Center, the Peacemaker, the Passport to Adventure, the Joyride and the Answer to all our deepest longings. The answer to all our fears, Man of Sorrows and Lord of Joy, always permitting what he hates, to accomplish something he loves. And he had brought me here, all the way from home–halfway around the earth–so I could declare to anyone within earshot of the whole universe, to anyone that might care, that yes—
There are more important things in life than walking.”

The other book I read doesn’t really fit in the same post with this one, but I suppose the contrast could be instructive. I discovered the name Olivia Manning while researching author’s birthdays a few months ago. She was an Englishwoman who married a British Council lecturer in Bucharest, Romania just before World War II. She later wrote The Balkan Trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, Friends and Heroes) based on her experiences during the war. The back of my library paperback copy of the trilogy says that Masterpiece Theatre made this story into a TV series called Fortunes of War starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. This information sounded hopeful; I can’t imagine Kenneth Branagh and EmmaThompson making a bad movie. Unfortunately, I also can’t imagine what even those two could have done with the material in this book. There are a few intriguing characters: Prince Yakimov is an impoverished White Russian emigre who lives off his experience in aristocratic circles; Sasha is the sheltered son of a Jewish banker who is conscripted into the Romanian army. The main characters, Guy and Helen, are, like the author and her husband, a British lecturer and his new bride. The problem is that after 924 pages, I still didn’t really like any of the characters, except for maybe poor Yaki. I think the idea of the book is a “portrait of a marriage under stress,” but by the time I got to the end, my thought was that this marriage was one that should never have been consummated in the first place. I was as tired of Helen and Guy as they were of each other, and I doubt even Kenneth and Emma could breathe new life into these characters and make them interesting again. I wanted to tell these guys, “There are more important things in life than your personal convenience, and there were things going on in Europe at this time more important than the petty politics of a second-rate English school.”