Homefront: The Diary of Piper Davis: The Fences Between Us, Seattle, 1941 by Kirby Larson

I couldn't look at Hank's ship when it pulled out of port. I felt like a little kid--maybe if I didn't look, he wouldn't really be gone. Mrs. Harada put her arms around my shoulders. But nothing could fill up the Hank-sized hole in my heart.

Then she told me she had something for me. "Here, Piper," she said, handing me this diary. It fit into my hand like it belonged there. "I bought it a long time ago. Now seems like the right time."

It's the perfect time," said Pop. "Every thirteen-year-old girl could benefit from the self-reflection a diary offers."

"This is Piper's." Mrs. Harada wagged a finger at Pop. "No one can tell her what to write in it. Not even you."

Piper's funny, loving big brother has joined the peacetime Navy to travel the world, but his carrier joins the fleet at Pearl Harbor just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the war becomes very close to Piper's coastal Oregon home. Fearing air raids, the town begins drills, with blackouts and curfews every night, and her family spends frightening days waiting for letters from Hank and news of his ship, he Enteprise, as the war in the Pacific is joined. Piper's dad, a minister to their local Japanese church, spends a lot of time at work, and her older sister Margie drops out of nursing school to work long hours in a defense plant.

Piper begins to rely upon her diary, ("DeeDee" for "dear diary") to record her thoughts. There are still good times, listening to big bands on the radio with her best friend Trixie, school dances with Bud, the dreamiest-looking eighth-grade boy, and a very different Christmas as the country settles into wartime mode.

But then President Roosevelt signs the Japanese removal act, decreeing that "alien and non-alien residents of Japanese origin must be rounded up and "removed" to internment camps, and Piper watches her old babysitter Mrs. Harada, her classmate Betty Sato, and all the members of her father's parish and the entire Japanese community, many of them citizens, are rounded up and crowded into trains and sent to a desolate, cold, and windy detention camp in Idaho. Like other people around her, Piper is torn between her fears for their young soldiers and sailors and their sympathy for their Japanese friends who lose their homes and businesses, some even imprisoned for fear that they might be spies. Everything is changing, and Piper turns to her diary and her camera to record the changes and her jumbled thoughts.

Then, as rationing of food, fabric, tires, and gasoline begins to change their lives at home, Piper's life is totally disrupted.

I hate, hate, hate my father!

Tonight after supper, Pop said he had something to tell me.

"We're moving." Pops cleared his throat. "To Minidoka."

I dropped my fork. "Where? No. No."

He's the pastor, not me, so I don't know why I have to go to Idaho. I'm not going to move.

But go Piper does. Trixie's family offers to let her live with them to finish eighth grade, and Margie stays behind to work at Boeing, but Piper's dad insists that she go with him.

In Twin Falls, outside the internment camp, Piper finds the town filled with "No Japs" signs, and they are soon evicted from their rented house when the owner discovers that her father works with the detainees at the camp. The Japanese families with whom she has celebrated Christmas and Easter, birthdays, and family outings are crammed into unheatable rooms, with hardships which range from dreary food in the mess hall to dust which yields to deep mud to rattlesnakes under the buildings, but when a school is set up there, Piper chooses to attend with Betty and the other children, despite the cold and constant illnesses that sweep through the children and elderly population.

Using her diary and her camera to chronicle and sort out the events unfolding around her, Piper matures as she weighs the hardship of the detainees against the sacrifice of all Americans, and although unable to resolve the conflict within, she realizes that there is something that everyone can do. Betty's brother volunteers for the Army, hoping to prove that Japanese-Americans are good citizens, and Piper does what she can to make their lives better and to help on the homefront.

It was Pop who helped me learn the most important thing. He made me realize that even if we can't do much about the fences that get built around people, when fences get built between people, it's our job to tear them down.

Newbery author Kirby Larson's The Dear America: The Fences Between Us (Scholastic) captures some of the fear, dislocation, and trials of the early days of World War II with the first person narrative of a sheltered young teen girl in 1941. Based on real characters from wartime Oregon, this edition in the Dear America books, an extensive series which features notable authors, is an absorbing "you are there" account of those days on the homefront for middle readers. Those who have enjoyed the American Girls Collection (Pleasant Company) will find this series equally to their maturing tastes. This addition is likewise supported by backmatter--epilogue, "Life in American in 1941," an historical and photographic appendix with related web sites, the text of speeches by President Roosevelt, and even a wartime sugarless recipe for oatmeal cookies from the period.

For a poignant novel from the point of view of a Japanese-American girl detainee of Piper's age, see Cynthia Kadohata's Weedflower (Atheneum).

Tell, Tell: Annexed by Sharon Dogar

Is everyone dead? Are there no Jews left except me?

"Tell, tell, tell, tell, tell," the voices beat at my body, so many voices, so many bodies, so many stories ended. It should be Anne here, Anne with her shining eyes standing in the doorway, crying, "I have so much to say, so many stories inside of me, Peter!"

"How can I tell of this?" I ask her in despair.

"Put it into words," she whispers, "and begin."

"Are there any words for this?"

"What else have we?"

Anne Frank is almost fourteen, still a child, really, and Peter Van Pels is almost sixteen and in love with a girl named Liese when they go into hiding in the famous annex in Amsterdam. Crowded into a couple of rooms behind a door concealed by a bookshelf , dependent on their Dutch protectors for their lives, the two families try to keep up their spirits, to educate their children, and wait for liberation by the English and Americans who seem still so far away.

Peter longs to live to walk free, outside in the sunshine and the rain. For Anne and her father the hope is to live and tell their story for those who cannot. Eventually, of course, their story is a personal tragedy. The annex is discovered; they are taken to concentration camps deep in Europe just ahead of the invading Allies, and all but Mr. Frank die as liberation draws near. As the Russians come, Peter lies near death, remembering it all, trying to tell their story to whomever will listen. But at that moment, in Anne's little plaid-bound diary left behind in the annex, their story lies waiting to be found, immortalized, as told in her poignant adolescent writings.

The two families are all too human in author Sharon Dogar's fictionalized account narrated by Peter Van Pels. Peter fights with his parents, embarrassed by his father's well-worn jokes and his mother's flirting and silly giggles, and finds Mr. Frank's dogged optimism tedious. At first Peter hates know-it-all Anne with her silly little girl chatter, and longs for his past life, his moments with Liese, his friends, his freedom to make his own life in the world. But as the two teenagers mature over two years in the annex, friendship and nascent love between them develops, and at last Peter understands why Anne must write:

I hold her as tight as I can, as though I could keep keep this fear from spilling out and drowning us. After a while the shakes become shudders.

She takes a deep breath. "I'm scared," she says. "Scared that all the things inside me will never see daylight."

"I know." I rock her. "Me, too."

Decades pass, events move on, and first-person accounts of the days of the Holocaust have become part of the tomes of history, something to study, like the Punic Wars, a part of the semester's syllabus. To make the young reader see and hear the reality of that time becomes harder as the past swiftly recedes behind us in the blur of the daily news cycle. Sharon Dogar's new historical novel, Annexed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), forthcoming in early October, is, as she says, a way of "reimagining history," a way, "to try to keep the facts of what happened during the Second World War alive for each new generation, in the hope that they remain aware of how catastrophic the consequences of hate can be."

Innumerable small holocausts since that time remind us why this is so.

The Diary of Anne Frank has been read and re-read, taught, dramatized, filmed, Cliff-noted, and annotated for half a century now. This new account, in the imagined thoughts and words of Peter Van Pels in his final days as a concentration camp prisoner, does more than just give us a different view of the Anne Frank rendered so vividly in her own words during their days hiding from the Nazis in the Annex. It reminds us that Anne's voice is only one of many, cut off by death so early, and it is now for her survivors, the reimagined Peter and the second, third, and subsequent generations of us all, to continue her witness. This novel does that honestly and well.

The trailer for Annexed may be seen here.

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.

Ending and Beginning Again: Clues in the Shadows: A Molly Mystery by Kathleen Ernst

It's spring of 1945, and although her father has returned from the war in Europe, he is deployed to work with seriously injured soldiers at the local vet hospital and can't seem to shake the sadness he brought home with him.

Molly, too, is weary with the long war: she can hardly remember a time before everyone was absorbed with the war effort--collecting scrap metal, rubber, rags, and even paper, working the third shift at the local aircraft factory as her friend Linda's mother does or volunteering with the Red Cross all day as her own mother does. Although the war in Europe seems to be winding down, rationing is tighter than ever, and Molly finds it hard to find the enthusiasm she once had for collecting paper scraps.

Still, when the school announces that a new award, the Eisenhower Medal, will go to the local student who collects the most paper, Molly decides to go for it, especially when her angry neighbor Ronnie Vanko taunts the girls that he will beat them out for the prize. But when Molly finds her diligently collected stack of papers, stashed in the garden shed, scattered and possibly pilfered, she and her friends decide to play Nancy Drew and stake out their stashes of paper in hopes of catching the thief. After several chilly nights waiting with a flashlight, however, Molly succeeds in catching only her neighbor, old Mrs.Petroski, who is out late, she claims, searching for her missing cat Marmalade.

Underneath the relief at the war's possible end, everyone seems to have their own war-induced problems, and even as the town celebrates the victory in Europe, Molly's visits to the local veterans' hospital where her dad works with soldiers suffering from "battle fatigue" reveal secrets and fears that she is now only beginning to understand. And when she finally catches the "Paper Prowler" in her own shed, she learns that there are secret fears and needs right next door that she has never guessed before.

Molly looked up at her parents. "Wars don't really end when the shooting stops, do they?"

Kathleen Ernst's latest in American Girls Molly Mystery series, Clues in the Shadows: A Molly Mystery (American Girl Mysteries) brings the personal history of the World War II home front a bit closer to young readers, as Molly McIntyre sees her friends' mothers, some gladly, some reluctantly, giving up their war industry jobs and men returning from service trying to find a place in a world and economy which is far different from the one they left in 1942. The times they are alway a-changing, and this notable historical fiction series does an excellent job in showing how earlier American girls dealt with the changes in their own times.

The Big War: For the Duration by Tomie de Paola

Dear Diary,

Today a sad thing happened to me at school.

I ran out of the music room, crying because my cousin Blackie was killed in the war.

YBFITW,
Tomie

Tomie's public tears at singing "We live in fame, go down in flames" after the his cousin is shot down in the war, leave big brother Buddy, summoned to take the weeping second-grader home, scornful and angry.

"Thanks a lot," said Buddy. "My friends are going to laugh at me because of you....

Big sissy!"

Buddy is not happy about Tomie's fondness for dancing school either, and when Tomie sets out to walk to his after-school class with his black patent-leather tap shoes proudly over his shoulder, Buddy joins the jeers and name-calling when the sixth-grade boys snatch and play keep-away with his shoes. And when the key to Tomie's diary disappears from under his pillow, he knows that Buddy is responsible, but he dares not tattle for fear of Buddy's threats of retaliation.

Meanwhile effects of the war become more and more evident on the home front. At the memorial for his cousin, the family suddenly hears an air raid drill siren, and his grandfather takes him up to his blacked-out apartment roof to watch the searchlights scan the sky for enemy planes. Food and gas rationing begins, with limits on the family's sugar, meat, coffee, butter, and a four-gallon per week quota of gasoline for the family car. An uncle goes off to war as well, and blue and gold stars appear in more and more windows on Fairmount Avenue. Uncle Tony tells Tomie that these changes are going to be part of all of their lives "for the duration."

But good things happen, too. Tomie has his first communion, and in May his narration and solos in the dance recital are a big hit with the audience. Victory gardens appear all around, and family gatherings on both the Irish and Italian side of his family are filled with fun and wonderful food, despite the shortages. He loves the citywide school art exhibit and can hardly wait to enter his own work in third grade. And when the missing key suddenly appears under his pillow and Tomie opens his diary to find it defaced with scribbled insults, he comes to a significant decision:

It was then that I decided to throw my diary away. I would remember everything I could. My thoughts would be saved in my head.

Why is my brother so mean? I guess it's just like the war. I guess I'll have to put up with him for the duration.

In the latest in his 26 Fairmount Avenue: The War Years series, de Paola continues his heartfelt autobiographical stories of his childhood during World War II in For the Duration: The War Years: A 26 Fairmount Avenue Book. For younger beginning chapter book readers, these books provide a realistic first-person view of life during the early years of World War II narrated from the view of a perceptive child with, apparently, a well-practiced memory for the flavor of life in those times.

Earlier books in this series are 26 Fairmount Avenue, Here We All Are (A 26 Fairmount Avenue Book), On My Way: A 26 Fairmount Avenue Book (De Paola, Tomie. 26 Fairmount Avenue Book.), What a Year!: A 26 Fairmount Avenue Book, Things Will Never Be The Same: A 26 Fairmount Avenue Book, I'm Still Scared: A 26 Fairmount Avenue Book (26 Fairmont Avenue), and Why?: A 26 Fairmount Avenue Book.

Home Front: When the Sergeant Came Marching Home by Don Lemna

Early in the summer of 1946, an infantry sergeant returned from the war and ruined my life by forcing me to move from our comfortable basement apartment in Wistola, Montana, out to a farm in the middle of nowhere.

At first the return of the Sergeant is great. His mom drives Don and six-year-old Pat down to Great Falls to meet the troop train. The family stays in a hotel, eats in restaurants, and even goes to a movie. The Sergeant marches in a stirring parade, shows Donald a heavy black handgun called a Luger for which he traded a pack of American cigarettes, and buys the family an old truck named Maggie. But then he buys something else--a farm--complete with a ramshackle house with no electricity and a privy with a crescent moon carved into the door.

I looked at my mother with tears in my eyes. I couldn't believe what she was doing to me. I didn't want to leave Milton and all my other friends. I didn't want to leave Mrs. Clarke at Wistola Elementary. I didn't want to leave the downtown, with its two movie theatres and the popcorn man and Riverside Park and all the other excitements.

"Will there be ducks?" Pat asked.

"I don't want to live on a farm," I groaned.

When I said this, my father's eyes became very hard and he looked down at me as if he were still a sergeant in the army.

"You'll do what you're told," the Sergeant said.

Donald spends his first days on the run-down farm sulking and avoiding his father, now the enemy, but as time goes by he begins to see the brighter side of rural life. Sentenced to shovel the droppings out of a long-abandoned chicken coop, he and Pat, become acquainted with their old plow horse when they decide to hitch him up to pull the chicken house to a cleaner spot of dirt. The coop collapses and their father makes them spend days taking the old boards apart and rebuilding the coop, but the boys do learn to ride their horse, curiously named Flight, all around the farm, provided they only turn left, the only direction the old horse will go.

With only girls for neighbors, Donald and Pat are forced to make friends with Charlie Pears, a slovenly and slothful neighbor who takes them on heart-pounding off-road jaunts in his ramshackle truck. Charlie also feeds them an exotic dish called beans and weenies and magnanimously gives them all his beer bottles--hundreds of them, worth ten cents a dozen in Wistola, which affords them a movie every Saturday in Wistola where they sell the eggs from the newly-housed hens. Then there's their farm's resident hermit, an old codger with a Santa Claus beard who tells them tall tales of the Great War while plying them with tea and rock-hard biscuits. And when school begins, Donald falls head over heels in love with the beautiful Miss Scott, who sings Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with her class between lessons.

Still, Donald plans to escape the farm, stashing his savings in a can hidden in the hayloft until he has enough to take him all the way to Hollywood, California. When his rich uncle sends him a ten dollar bill for his birthday, Donald has his grub stake to Tinsel Town and must only wait until school is out in June to be free of farm life at last. But when the long-awaited day comes, Don figures he might as well postpone departure until after the June picnic and concert and the Fourth of July celebration with all the free ice cream he can eat, and soon the long summer seems to be zooming by faster than the freight train he plans to ride to California.

Don Lemna's semi-autobiographical account of post-war farm life in rural Montana, When the Sergeant Came Marching Home, is a touching, authentic, and laugh-out-loud look at boyhood in a time that is fast receding into the past. Blessed with wonderful chapter head illustrations by Matt Collins, this nostalgic novel has broad appeal for all ages and deserves a place alongside Robert McCloskey's Homer Price and Centerburg Tales: More Adventures of Homer Price as classic tales of mid-twentieth century boyhood.

The Big War: The Klipfish Code by Mary Casanova

At the next clearing Marit stopped and looked back. Godoy and the surrounding islands rose like humpback whales from the sparkling sea. So much had remained the same. The same sea, the same deeply carved fjords, the same towering mountains beyond. Nearly two years had passed since she'd last returned home from skiing in the mountains with her family--two long years since bombs fell and her world collapsed.

Through the cedar's long branches, a man whispered, "Don't move... ." "Help me...finish."

"Finish what?"

"Mission--f-for Norway!"

Every moment that she lingered drew her into his fate. And if she helped him, she would be putting not only herself at great risk. Stories she'd heard from the islanders flashed through her mind. Whole families removed in the middle of the night, whole villages bombed beyond recognition, simply because one person was caught helping the Resistance. She remembered the warning posted on Bestefar's boat: "You shall not in any way give shelter to or aid the enemy. To do so is punishable by death."

At this moment in time, twelve-year-old Marit has to decide, as so many citizens of Norway had to do in those years of Nazi occupation.

Seeking to find safety for Marit and her young brother Lars, her parents, drawn by their patriotism to join the Resistance, have sent the children to live with their domineering, silent grandfather, Bestefar, and schoolteacher aunt Ingeborg on Godoy Island just off the western coast. But there is no safety even on Godoy: the Nazis occupy this small island with its strategic position near shipping channels and confiscate whatever they need from the farmer-fisherman community--eggs, milk, produce, even the blankets and down comforters that keep the children warm through the arctic nights. Families who willingly abet the occupiers are shunned; their pastor leaves his pulpit rather than preach the German doctrine, and their Aunt Ingeborg becomes one of the one in ten teachers who are sent to a northern concentration camp as a warning to teachers who refuse to instruct students as the Nazi government decrees.

Although Bestefar has ordered her to do nothing to attract the attention of their occupiers, Marit remembers the courage of her Aunt Ingeborg and agrees to help the wounded Resistance fighter. Rowing several miles along the stormy coastline with Lars and his cat along to make the trip look like a childish expedition, she finally makes her way to the next coastal village and with the code words "Do you have any klipfish?" passes on the compass given her by the wounded man. Risking her family's lives, Marit rows the wounded man back under the noses of the Nazi watchers and hides him in their barn's hayloft. Marit struggles to care for the dying man while keeping her secret from her grandfather, but when he wakes her a few nights later and hides her and Lars with other Resistance fighters in the hold of his small fishing boat bound for the Shetland Islands, Marit realizes that Bestefar, too, has been secretly aiding the escape of known Resistance fighters all along.

Mary Casanova's The Klipfish Code is a harrowing narration based on true stories of the Norwegian resistance during World War II. Marit is a complex protagonist whose character evolves from the frightened ten-year-old who first experiences the bombing of her home in Isfjorden to the mature fifteen-year-old who is finally reunited with her parents and homeland at the conclusion. Well plotted and grounded in the local setting and tautly written, this book should take its place with other historical novels of the Scandinavian resistance such as Lois Lowry's Newbery Award-winning Number the Stars and Marie McSwigan's classic Snow Treasure.

Finding Something Lost: The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World by E. L. Konigsburg

Amadeo Kaplan knew that he had found the something he had always wanted, "something that had been lost, something that people didn't even know was lost until it was found, by him. " As Deo discovers the simply framed crayon sketch of a woman, concealed behind shelved books, and reads the signature "Modigliani" scrawled across the upper corner, he feels that this is it--not just a rare and valuable piece of art, but something more, a story that begins with him but reaches far beyond, back more than a half century, and reaches forward to the people now with him in this dusty, hot room in an old Florida mansion.

Sixth-grader Amadeo is drawn to Mrs. Zender's old house by his desire to uncover lost things and his need to find a friend in his new middle school. When he meets and follows self-contained William Wilcox into the shabby old Italianate mansion being prepared for a liquidation sale, he gets to know the owner, former diva and genuine personage Aida Lily Tull Zender, and senses that here he will uncover his mystery. As he helps William and his mother, liquidator Dora Wilcox, sort through the contents of the estate for sale, Amadeo begin to unravel a thread which leads him back to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the confiscation of fine art from its former Jewish owners.

Each person caught up in that thread--his godfather Peter Vanderwaal, Peter's mother, father, his Uncle Pieter, who died in a concentration camp, and Mrs. Zender herself--has a part in the theft, blackmail, and deceit which comes to rest in a simple sketch given her by Mrs. Zender's husband. The history of how the Modigliani drawing, labeled "degenerate art by the Nazis, passed from Pieter Van der Waal's Amsterdam shop to German officers, through an Austrian social pretender and into the hands of Mrs. Zender as a wedding gift becomes Deo's "lost thing" more so than the work of art itself.

In The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World two-time Newbery author E. L. Konigsburg picks up characters from her earlier books The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place and Silent to the Bone in a novel which develops like an archaeological dig, exposing layer after layer of personal history without ever revealing the whole truth of the site. A book for older readers than her Newbery classic From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, it shares the theme of a mysterious work of art, an eccentric but enabling older woman, and two young people who uncover much about human nature as they excavate the long buried provenance behind the work of art itself. More than usual, Konigsburg's writing here is sometimes dense and sometimes enigmatic, as her character Mrs. Zenger says of life itself, "ninety percent unknown." As always, though, her characters and settings are brilliantly drawn, fascinating in detail, and her descriptive writing is sometimes achingly beautiful. This is a book which asks much of the reader but offers a great deal in return.

The Big War: The Last Mission by Harry Mazer

When 15-year-old Jack Raab's older brother fails his physical for the draft, Jack feels that it is his duty to uphold his Jewish family's honor by entering the war to defeat Hitler. Using his brother's birth certificate, Jack conceals his real age and fakes his way through flight training. Despite being underage, he manages to to qualify as a waist gunner in a B-17 crew assigned to fly missions against Germany in the last year of World War II.

Filled at first with heroic dreams of becoming a fighter pilot ace, Jack finds flying missions over Europe terrifying for himself and the rest of his young crew. In their twenty-fifth mission, their B-17 is badly damaged and ditches in the North Sea near the English coast. Picked up by British sailors, the crew is immediately re-assigned to a new aircraft and takes off for a bombing run over Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. In a horrifying scene over their target, the plane suffers a direct hit and Jack sees his best friend killed and the others scrambling to bail out.

Jack follows and is the only crew member to survive ground fire and land safely. Injured and frightened, he hides for several days before being taken prisoner by a ragtag group of disheartened Luftwaffe airmen. Jack is suddenly freed when the disorganized German army flees before the advancing Russians and eventually makes his way back to the American lines. When Jack is rotated back to the States and reassigned to the Pacific theatre, he finally decides to reveal his true age, now sixteen, and goes back home to begin his adjustment to civilian life as a high school student again.

As always, Harry Mazer's writing is taut, packs plenty of action, and sticks to the main story line without digression. Readers who are fascinated with the bombers which dominated the air war in Europe will enjoy reading The Last Mission, in tandem with Iain Lawrence's B for Buster reviewed here on April 6.

For serious World War II buffs, The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945, the companion book to Ken Burns' soon-to-be-aired PBS documentary, is now available. This book deals with "the necessary war," not from the point of view of leaders and campaigns, but from the intimate accounts of over forty people who describe their own personal experiences, from prisoner-of-war camps, the air war, the home front, and the slog war of grunts in the Pacific theatre. First-person narratives and original photographs should bring The War home to those generations who did not experience it in person.

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.