The Big War: A Faraway Island by Annika Thor

The farther out along the island road they get, the fewer and further between the houses are. The road twists and turns among bare gray rocks.

Aunt Marta pedals slowly up a long hill and stops at the crest. In front of them is the endless, leaden-gray ocean. In the distance, just barely visible, there's the brown silhouette of a sail against the backdrop of sea and sky. After that there's nothing but the horizon, a thin ribbon of light at the far edge.

The end of the world, Stephie thinks. This must be the end of the world.

As Hitler's army invades Austria, Stephanie and little sister Nellie Steiner are sent by their parents from Vienna along with 500 other Jewish children to a promised refuge in Sweden. Nellie settles in and learns Swedish quickly with the lively young children of "Auntie Alma" and her family, but Stephie is placed with a older and childless couple, the distant "Aunt Marta" and the seldom seen "Uncle Evert," a fisherman. Their parents have promised to come for them and take them to American as soon as they get visas, but the promised short stay in Sweden turns into months.

Nellie adapts happily in her warm, easy-going family, but Stephie struggles to relate to the silent and undemonstrative Marta as she tries to make the best of life on the small coastal island. Always a gifted student, she forces herself to learn Swedish as fast as possible and to excel at her studies, made easier by the fact that she finds herself repeating sixth grade, the final grade of schooling offered in the small village school.

Even on a faraway island in the Baltic Sea, Stephie encounters ill will against Jews, and she is constantly teased and tormented by a clique of girls led by their hateful ringleader Sylvia. Still, most people are polite and some are kind, and Stephanie tries to please by fitting into the community as best she can, earning the affection of the friendly Evert, the admiration of her teacher, and eventually the respect of Aunt Marta.

But still underlying prejudice bursts forth when Ragnor, a summer tourist, reveals what lies beneath the surface even there:

"We know why you're here," the boy says. "You get out of Germany with your money and your jewels and think you can just buy up our country like you were trying to do in Germany. But you'll never get away with it. The Germans will be here, too,...and they'll deal with people like you--you filthy Jew-kid."

Then, surprisingly, Stephie sees her stern foster mother comes to her defense, confronting the boy's family bravely, and Stephanie knows that in her own way Marta has come to love her:

"No one," says Aunt Marta, "no one is going to come along and say such things to my little girl."

My little girl, Aunt Marta had said. MY little girl! As if Stephie were her very own child.

Long popular in Sweden, Annika Thor's partly autobiographical A Faraway Island, the first of four books and the subject of a long-running television series, has just been published in the U. S. in a skilled translation by Linda Schenck. Beautifully and sensitively written, this fine historical novel joins other books such as Lois Lowry's Newbery Award-winning Number the Stars Norma Fox Mazer's Good Night, Maman (Harper Trophy Books), Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Marilyn Sachs' A Pocket Full of Seeds, and Johanna Reiss' The Upstairs Room (Trophy Newbery), in telling the story of Jewish children during World War II in Europe. It is hoped that the rest of the series will soon be published here as well.

On January 18 A Faraway Island was awarded the prestigious 2010 American Library Association's Mildred L. Batchelder Award for an outstanding children's book translated from a foreign language and subsequently published in the United States.

Sister Sally's Story: My Brother Abe: Sally Lincoln's Story by Harry Mazer

In this year bicentennial birth year of Abraham Lincoln, veteran writer Harry Mazer has turned his considerable storytelling and historical fiction skills to an account to some of the most formative years of Lincoln's childhood, narrated by his older sister Sarah, called Sally.

When Abe was eight and Sally ten, the Lincoln family, Thomas and Nancy, were faced with the prospect of losing their 278 acre farm on Knob Creek in Kentucky. Kentucky's frontier land laws were lax, and Thomas Lincoln learned that title to the land he had bought and paid for in cash was actually held by others. Sadly and in disgust with their state's law, the family left their comfortable house which able carpenter Thomas had built on the Louisville-Nashville Road and with their cow Sweet Pea and wagon pulled by their horse Branch, set out to homestead Federal land available in the undeveloped woods of Indiana.

Sally tells the story of that trip, camping beside the road, falling behind and getting lost, and finally arriving to what seemed like an utter wilderness. Sally describes their three-sided lean-to cabin, her fear of wild animals as they slept with little but a fire between them and the forest, and the joy when neighbors gathered to help them raise a small, dirt-floored cabin in which they lived while their father cleared land for spring planting.

Sally and Abe had occasionally been able to attend a Mr. Riney's subscription school in Knob Creek, but now their education was mostly in the tasks of daily life. Abe, tall and unusually strong like his father, began his skills with the axe, and Sally helped her mother with almost all of the other tasks of survival, collecting dandelion and plantain roots and leaves to supplement the wild meat that Thomas brought home.

"There was goodness and patience in Mama that I could never find in in me," Sally says, but despite childhood quarrels and competition, Sally and her younger brother grew up close, practicing reading and writing whenever they could. Their love and loyalty was tested greatly when their beloved mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln died of "milk fever," (snakeroot poisoning) and their father fell into an unusually idle depression. At last a letter arrived from a dear childhood friend, Sarah Bush Johnson, who, having heard from relatives of Nancy's death, wrote a letter of condolence and mentioned that she also was left with children to raise after her husband's death. Thomas soon dictated a reply to Sarah, proposing a marriage of convenience for both of them, and when Sally was twelve and Abe ten, he set forth to Kentucky to fetch Sarah back as their new stepmother.

Left alone with only their teen-aged cousin Dennis Hanks, who had lost his guardians to milk fever also, Sally and Abe endured a hard time during their father's absence, but the marriage proved a good one for the Lincoln children. Sarah Johnson arrived with three children, furniture, household goods, and boundless energy and affection for her new stepchildren. A woman whose respect for learning prompted her to transport books across the wilderness, Sarah encouraged their further education when it was available and allowed them to read and learn despite her own minimal literacy.

In his My Brother Abe: Sally Lincoln's Story, (Simon & Schuster, 2009) Harry Mazer uses Sally Lincoln's keen spirit and lively voice to tell the story of little brother Abe's early years in a way which speaks straight to the heart of elementary readers. Through his spirited but dutiful big sister's eyes, the reader sees both the trials and the joys of a frontier family which helped shape the man Lincoln became. For youngsters who may find the textbook accounts of Lincoln's later life a bit remote, this new piece of historical fiction, filled with childhood fun and adventures as well as hardships, will help them understand the child who was father of the man.