Random, on reading....
Jun. 4th, 2023 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66... well, not that random. I just finished a new YA historical fiction book (one of my very favorite genre categories) and it reminds me that that this is a sort of niche genre I fucking adore: WWII historical fiction-on-the-homefront. I have read an awful lot of it. Herewith is a sort of round-up. I am not sure how complete it will be.
First, the Ur WWII homefront-Britain-evacuation story: C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe -- yes, it's a Christian allegory, and yes, that even annoyed me at the time ("the time" was probably when I was ten years old, and definitely deciding on atheism, which I had been basically raised, but with a recruiting nun-great-aunt), with Aslan/Jesus, sacrificed on the stone altar. LWW begins with the four upper middle class siblings being evacuated to a great-uncle's country manor, which is different from most subsequent entries in this sub-genre. It might be the only one that was written contemporaneously. It's amazing, obviously, despite the heavy-handed Christianity.
I am not entirely sure what I read next, but it might have been Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which is ALMOST a separate sub-genre, overlapping with Holocaust stories... a Jewish family from Berlin flees the Nazis, escaping slowly through Switzerland. I did not know until much later that there were two further sequels, these set in England. Those were called Bombs on Aunt Dainty, and A Small Person Far Away, which is more a story of the Cold War, oddly enough. And apparently When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is now a movie! Made in 2021! I will watch that.
There are a lot of amazing and wonderful Holocaust YA novels (and of course, Anne Frank's Diary), from classics like Lois Lowry's Number the Stars where a Danish Jewish girl is saved by Resistance activists, to The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen* (very hard hitting and wonderful), to Good Night, Maman by Norma Fox Mazer** (1999) -- this is about two French Jews who flee the Nazis in Paris, with their mother, but their mother falls ill and they have to complete the journey on their own... to okay this could be an entry on its own, and I am going to rein it in, and maybe devote another entry to this subgenre of YA historical fiction.***
Okay. Of home front books -- many are in England, increasingly there are several from America (in addition to those that were part of the "Dear America" historical-fictional diary series), and there are a few from Canada. Canadian: two novels by Jean Little called From Anna, and Listen for the Singing, which are about a free-thinking German family who are able to leave Nazi Germany and resettle in Toronto, where the heroine of the book is almost legally blind, but her family is not aware of this gigantic problem. They're both extremely wonderful stories, with lots of feels. Of American books on the home front... well, of course one of the most deservedly famous ones is Farewell to Manzanar about the experience of Japanese internment, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. Arguably Elizabeth Enright's Melendy quartet (all but the last one) are home front YA novels, though they also were contemporaneous, and the war is viewed from a pretty comfortable distance.
Very recent US-based YA home front novels include Louisa June and the Nazis in the Waves by L. M. Elliot, and War and Millie McGonigle which is about a girl in San Diego as WWII begins. It's by Karen Cushman, another of my absolute favorite YA historical fiction authors. Probably my absolute favorite American YA novels about WWII on the home front are by a local author whom I have actually met (when she did a book talk at the school library at Bohannon Middle School where I used to work). Ellen Klages has written a trilogy and the first two are set during and just after WWII (the third is at the time of Sputnik) and OH how I wish she would fill in the middle, in the early 1950s. The first one is called The Green Glass Sea and is about the scientists at Los Alamos who built the atomic bomb... and the stories of two misfit girls who are there with their families. The second one is White Sands, Red Menace and is about those same girls after the war, as their Chemist mother (I'm simplifying; read them) works to protest the weapon she's helped build, and is alienated from her scientist husband who works with Werner Von Braun on the V-2 rocket program... They're about SO MUCH MORE than that, though. Interestingly, like the Jean Little books, these have a sub-theme of disability awareness.
There are more books set in Britain than anywhere else, I think, and I've read most of them. However, I am going to narrow my focus to one author, because I love everything she's written. I am not sure when I first read Good Night Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian, but I loved it immediately. It is a tear-jerker. It is a story of dual redemption. It is a gorgeous picture of village life in an unspecified county in England (possibly Dorset? The film's fictional village was apparently in Buckinghamshire, but the local accents seem more pronounced than those would be, in the book). An abused boy from London is evacuated to the countryside and ends up with a gruff, cantankerous old man who is the verger of a country church. I ... I just love this book, and all of the other ones Magorian has written on similar topics: Back Home about a girl coming back to Britain after WWII, from where she was evacuated to during the war, Vermont. One of Magorian's clear interests is theater, so the American family Rusty lived with are bohemians, and fitting back into post-war upper middle class Britain is extremely difficult. Her other books are also post-war -- Just Henry is about family dislocation, post-war Labour reforms to open education up, rationing and gangs, and early 1950s cinema. A Cuckoo in the Nest explores working class life and drift from it, induced by evacuation during the war, and also the immediate post war theater world; A Spoonful of Jam is a sequel to that one, starring the younger sister, who also gets involved in local theater, there's an early 1960s sequel (Impossible!) with the youngest sibling and, of all things, a Theater Workshop vanguard director, Joan Littlewood. Finally, there's her shot at romance, very definitely a home front WWII novel, titled (in the US) Not a Swan and in Britain, A Little Love Song where three daughters of an actress on tour for the troops are evacuated to the same seaside village that features as a secondary location in Good Night Mister Tom and untangle a mystery about the former owner of their cottage. It's wonderful.
What made me write this entry today was finishing a new book -- called A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus, which is definitely an inheritor of both the class position of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the displacement and need for a new family of Good Night Mister Tom. It's lovely. The War that Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley seems to me more derivative of Good Night Mister Tom... almost a female version of it in the first person. Sigh. Oh -- and a last set... these are weird and quirky -- the Montmaray Journals trilogy, by Michelle Cooper, which feature a sort of decayed upper class family from a fictional tiny flyspeck of a "kingdom" island off the coast of England. They're interesting, for sure.
----------
*Jane Yolen also wrote the brilliant and not entirely YA (though I think it's fine for high school) Holocaust novel Briar Rose, one of the Tor series of modern fairy tale adaptations.
**Norma Fox Mazer, like Paula Danziger, is also one of the rare American YA authors... I guess Judy Blume, also, and certainly Beverly Cleary... who wrote of regular working class existence, in YA lives.
***This belongs in that separate entry, but I will never give up a chance to plug Kathryn Lasky's writing (except for her money-spinning Guardians of Ga'Hoole series, nary a one of which I've read)... she has written A LOT of standalone titles that interrogate fascism and the Nazis, and WWII, but the closest she's come to home front stuff is Ashes set in the lead up to WWII in Berlin, about a 13 year old German girl who loves to read and sees Nazi book banning and burning begin. Lasky's The Night Journey is a classic story (from her family's history) of Jews escaping pogroms in Poland. But she tries generally to write WWII historical YA fiction in the interstices of what is already familiar. Her three most recent books were amazing: The Extra about Leni Riefenstahl's use of Romany as extras in at least one of her blockbusters -- stuff I never knew; Night Witches about young Russian women flying fighting missions against Nazi airfields and troops (AMAZING), and Faceless a sort of semi-supernatural YA spy story set during WWII.
First, the Ur WWII homefront-Britain-evacuation story: C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe -- yes, it's a Christian allegory, and yes, that even annoyed me at the time ("the time" was probably when I was ten years old, and definitely deciding on atheism, which I had been basically raised, but with a recruiting nun-great-aunt), with Aslan/Jesus, sacrificed on the stone altar. LWW begins with the four upper middle class siblings being evacuated to a great-uncle's country manor, which is different from most subsequent entries in this sub-genre. It might be the only one that was written contemporaneously. It's amazing, obviously, despite the heavy-handed Christianity.
I am not entirely sure what I read next, but it might have been Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which is ALMOST a separate sub-genre, overlapping with Holocaust stories... a Jewish family from Berlin flees the Nazis, escaping slowly through Switzerland. I did not know until much later that there were two further sequels, these set in England. Those were called Bombs on Aunt Dainty, and A Small Person Far Away, which is more a story of the Cold War, oddly enough. And apparently When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is now a movie! Made in 2021! I will watch that.
There are a lot of amazing and wonderful Holocaust YA novels (and of course, Anne Frank's Diary), from classics like Lois Lowry's Number the Stars where a Danish Jewish girl is saved by Resistance activists, to The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen* (very hard hitting and wonderful), to Good Night, Maman by Norma Fox Mazer** (1999) -- this is about two French Jews who flee the Nazis in Paris, with their mother, but their mother falls ill and they have to complete the journey on their own... to okay this could be an entry on its own, and I am going to rein it in, and maybe devote another entry to this subgenre of YA historical fiction.***
Okay. Of home front books -- many are in England, increasingly there are several from America (in addition to those that were part of the "Dear America" historical-fictional diary series), and there are a few from Canada. Canadian: two novels by Jean Little called From Anna, and Listen for the Singing, which are about a free-thinking German family who are able to leave Nazi Germany and resettle in Toronto, where the heroine of the book is almost legally blind, but her family is not aware of this gigantic problem. They're both extremely wonderful stories, with lots of feels. Of American books on the home front... well, of course one of the most deservedly famous ones is Farewell to Manzanar about the experience of Japanese internment, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. Arguably Elizabeth Enright's Melendy quartet (all but the last one) are home front YA novels, though they also were contemporaneous, and the war is viewed from a pretty comfortable distance.
Very recent US-based YA home front novels include Louisa June and the Nazis in the Waves by L. M. Elliot, and War and Millie McGonigle which is about a girl in San Diego as WWII begins. It's by Karen Cushman, another of my absolute favorite YA historical fiction authors. Probably my absolute favorite American YA novels about WWII on the home front are by a local author whom I have actually met (when she did a book talk at the school library at Bohannon Middle School where I used to work). Ellen Klages has written a trilogy and the first two are set during and just after WWII (the third is at the time of Sputnik) and OH how I wish she would fill in the middle, in the early 1950s. The first one is called The Green Glass Sea and is about the scientists at Los Alamos who built the atomic bomb... and the stories of two misfit girls who are there with their families. The second one is White Sands, Red Menace and is about those same girls after the war, as their Chemist mother (I'm simplifying; read them) works to protest the weapon she's helped build, and is alienated from her scientist husband who works with Werner Von Braun on the V-2 rocket program... They're about SO MUCH MORE than that, though. Interestingly, like the Jean Little books, these have a sub-theme of disability awareness.
There are more books set in Britain than anywhere else, I think, and I've read most of them. However, I am going to narrow my focus to one author, because I love everything she's written. I am not sure when I first read Good Night Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian, but I loved it immediately. It is a tear-jerker. It is a story of dual redemption. It is a gorgeous picture of village life in an unspecified county in England (possibly Dorset? The film's fictional village was apparently in Buckinghamshire, but the local accents seem more pronounced than those would be, in the book). An abused boy from London is evacuated to the countryside and ends up with a gruff, cantankerous old man who is the verger of a country church. I ... I just love this book, and all of the other ones Magorian has written on similar topics: Back Home about a girl coming back to Britain after WWII, from where she was evacuated to during the war, Vermont. One of Magorian's clear interests is theater, so the American family Rusty lived with are bohemians, and fitting back into post-war upper middle class Britain is extremely difficult. Her other books are also post-war -- Just Henry is about family dislocation, post-war Labour reforms to open education up, rationing and gangs, and early 1950s cinema. A Cuckoo in the Nest explores working class life and drift from it, induced by evacuation during the war, and also the immediate post war theater world; A Spoonful of Jam is a sequel to that one, starring the younger sister, who also gets involved in local theater, there's an early 1960s sequel (Impossible!) with the youngest sibling and, of all things, a Theater Workshop vanguard director, Joan Littlewood. Finally, there's her shot at romance, very definitely a home front WWII novel, titled (in the US) Not a Swan and in Britain, A Little Love Song where three daughters of an actress on tour for the troops are evacuated to the same seaside village that features as a secondary location in Good Night Mister Tom and untangle a mystery about the former owner of their cottage. It's wonderful.
What made me write this entry today was finishing a new book -- called A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus, which is definitely an inheritor of both the class position of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the displacement and need for a new family of Good Night Mister Tom. It's lovely. The War that Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley seems to me more derivative of Good Night Mister Tom... almost a female version of it in the first person. Sigh. Oh -- and a last set... these are weird and quirky -- the Montmaray Journals trilogy, by Michelle Cooper, which feature a sort of decayed upper class family from a fictional tiny flyspeck of a "kingdom" island off the coast of England. They're interesting, for sure.
----------
*Jane Yolen also wrote the brilliant and not entirely YA (though I think it's fine for high school) Holocaust novel Briar Rose, one of the Tor series of modern fairy tale adaptations.
**Norma Fox Mazer, like Paula Danziger, is also one of the rare American YA authors... I guess Judy Blume, also, and certainly Beverly Cleary... who wrote of regular working class existence, in YA lives.
***This belongs in that separate entry, but I will never give up a chance to plug Kathryn Lasky's writing (except for her money-spinning Guardians of Ga'Hoole series, nary a one of which I've read)... she has written A LOT of standalone titles that interrogate fascism and the Nazis, and WWII, but the closest she's come to home front stuff is Ashes set in the lead up to WWII in Berlin, about a 13 year old German girl who loves to read and sees Nazi book banning and burning begin. Lasky's The Night Journey is a classic story (from her family's history) of Jews escaping pogroms in Poland. But she tries generally to write WWII historical YA fiction in the interstices of what is already familiar. Her three most recent books were amazing: The Extra about Leni Riefenstahl's use of Romany as extras in at least one of her blockbusters -- stuff I never knew; Night Witches about young Russian women flying fighting missions against Nazi airfields and troops (AMAZING), and Faceless a sort of semi-supernatural YA spy story set during WWII.