The Big War: The Art of Keeping Cool by Janet Taylor Lisle

As German submarines prowl below the ocean surface just off the Rhode Island coast, Robert struggles to uncover the secrets hidden beneath the surface of his extended family's past.

When his father is sent to England as a bomber pilot in early 1942, Robert's mother moves him and his little sister from their Ohio farm to the Rhode Island coast to be near his father's parents and brother. For the first time Robert meets his gruff and seemingly resentful grandfather, his kind but browbeaten grandmother, and his strange artistic cousin, Elliot. Elliot is silent and withdrawn with the family but reveals to Robert his talent for amazingly realistic drawings. The two boys becomes friends of a sort, united in their interest in the war, particularly the giant artillery guns being dug in at a nearby coastal fort.

While scouting out the secured gun emplacements, the two boys observe a German-born painter slipping through a slit in the security fence with binoculars and a notebook, and Elliot reveals that he has been invited by this famous artist, Abel Hoffman, to visit his studio in the woods and discuss his art. At Robert's urging, Elliot agrees to go, and the two boys visit Hoffman's studio, watch as he works, and listen to the story of his persecution as an expressionist artist under Hitler's Nazi regime.

When a test firing of the 16-inch guns is scheduled, Robert and his little sister slip through the hidden opening in the security fence to watch, and as the giant artillery pieces roar, they see Hoffman fleeing the military police. When caught by the MP's, Robert reluctantly admits that he saw Hoffman inside the military reservation. The townspeople turn on Hoffman and beat him severely, and as German submarines continue to sink freighters just off their coast, they eventually hold Hoffman responsible and burn his studio and paintings, causing his death in the flames.

Stunned by Hoffman's unjust death and worried over the downing of his father's bomber over France, Robert feels compelled to unearth the buried enmity within his own family, a story of near murderous conflict between Robert's grandfather and his own father which Elliot reluctantly reveals. Robert finally understands his father's estrangement from his parents and the covenant of silence which has kept the guilty secret for so long. The big war, the senseless death of an innocent artist, and the revelation of the long-ago conflict between father and son, all become part of Robert's coming of age in his fourteenth summer.

Newbery author Janet Taylor Lisle's The Art of Keeping Cool uses World War II not just as its background, but almost as a metaphor for the grim undercurrent of violence in human life. Just as the boys search the ocean for a sighting of a German U-boat beneath the waves, Robert finds the dark side of the human heart beneath the quiet surface of his town and his own family.