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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.

Once a Queen by Sarah Arthur

Jun8

At first, I thought this 2024 middle grade/YA fantasy novel from Waterbrook Press was Narnia fan fiction, or perhaps a Narnia sequel, Susan’s Story: Once a Queen in Narnia or something like that. (“Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.”) That expectation was a disservice to the novel as it is. Sarah Arthur’s story certainly has strong echoes of Narnia, as well as being indebted to E. Nesbit, George MacDonald, Elizabeth Goudge, and Madeleine L’Engle, influences the author acknowledges in an author’s Q & A in the back of the book. So in my defense, I didn’t know, and the Narnia-love was there from the beginning.

I would advise readers to take Once a Queen on its own terms and NOT try to compare or find connections to any other stories or worlds until you get to the end. In this particular story, fourteen year old American Eva Joyce comes with her British mother to visit her estranged grandmother in the family manor of Carrick Hall in the West Midlands region of England. The year is 1995. Eva has been nurtured by the classic fantasy tales and children’s books, especially the Ternival tales of Mesterra by A.H.W. Clifton. She’s never actually experienced a magical portal to another world, however, even though this trip to England feels a bit like a fairy tale.

And the story does turn into a fairy tale, complete with magical worlds, an evil queen, secret gardens, fantastical creatures, and a quest to be completed. And secrets. Lots of secrets. Eva’s mum has secrets. Eva’s grandmother has secrets. Eva herself discovers so many wondrous secret things that she finds herself unable to keep all of the secrets straight. Who can be told about what, and when, and how? And what secrets are being withheld from Eva and why? This whole secret motif is the weakest part of the book: too many people keeping too many secrets for too little reason. Nevertheless, I resigned myself to getting bits of information doled out to me in each chapter –reluctantly and incompletely.

The novel itself alternates between strange occurrences in our world as Eva gets to know her grandmother and her grandmother’s tragic history and equally strange events in the world of Mesterra, woven by Magister, and ruled by a long line of kings and queens who built a a great kingdom called Ternival. Of course, there are doors between the worlds, hard to find and harder to open, but real. And Eva and her friend Frankie, the gardener’s grandson, are determined to find the way into the fantasy world that they have read about in books and somehow to solve the problems of their own world by doing so.

Once a Queen is a a lovely story with Christian worldview underpinnings, despite all of the secrets and slow revelations, and I highly recommend it to lovers of high fantasy and adventure stories. The novel is set up for a sequel, perhaps many sequels, and indeed there is a “sneak preview” of the next book in the series that is printed in the back of of this first book. The next book is to be called Once a Castle, and I look forward to its publication. (Once a Queen is complete in itself, and does not end in a cliffhanger.) Recommended for ages 12 and up.