When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

 Of all the World War II books I've read (and I've read a'plenty), Molly Guptill Manning's 2014 nonfiction work told a story I hadn't heard. Set against Hitler-inspired book burnings in Nazi Germany, the story follows the true account of an American response, providing American soldiers with reading material.

The first step was the Victory Book Campaign, a move started by an organization of librarians to collect book donations to send overseas. The campaign collected a huge number of books, some more appropriate for battlefield reading than others.

Realizing the difficulty of traveling in war time with hardback books, American publishing companies were convinced to work together to produce American Service Editions (ASEs) of popular titles and classics in a small enough size to fit in back pockets. 

The books were such a success that their delivery to servicemen was awaited impatiently. Soldiers who had never considered themselves readers found that books gave them a sense of escape, a chance to laugh, a way to temporarily time travel back home.

Manning addresses some political maneuvers that resulted in censorship during the election year as Roosevelt ran for his last term. For awhile, books deemed the least bit political were forbidden. At a time when the nation was working through how to let soldiers vote, they were for a time barred from reading books to which people back home had easy access.

There were descriptions of books found in operating rooms and foxholes. Despite their inexpensive production, the readers took care so that they could be enjoyed by as many readers as possible. Among the favorites was Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith received a regular flood of fan mail throughout the war.

Manning also details the beginnings of the G. I. Bill that allowed returning soldiers to complete their education, another process that took some tweaking along the way. I admit I'm glad they didn't have the Netflix option, which might have prevented so many from becoming lifelong readers.

Even though it's hard to imagine such a program being so popular now, I am reminded of one of my former high school students who emailed occasionally from the Middle East for reading suggestions. Now that I have a number of veterans in my composition classes, I find that many of them admit that they picked up a reading habit during their tours of duty too. I suspect that helps to explain why they make such great participants in our learning community.

At the end of her book, Manning pointed out that the ASEs printed during WWII outnumbered all the books burned by the Nazi regime. She referred to the Empty Library in Berlin, a memorial to that time. Perhaps, she suggested, we need a counterpart in the United States to commemorate this most powerful response. 

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam

Books don't fit into a true diagnosis of hoarding; that's my firm conviction. While I admit to waves of guilt when I rearrange my shelves and see books I haven't quite managed to read yet, I still give them a place to wait. Too many times to mention, when I've finished one book without another pestering me to read it, I've scanned my shelves and landed on just the right book at just the right time.

During this period of quarantine, I've had access to the library's electronic collections, both audio and print. Sometimes, I have found my time limit up before I've finished reading, and the book is whisked away to the next reader on the waiting list.

I'm also thankful that Parnassus Books still continued to deliver book orders, after having to abandon curbside pick-up.

My own book collection, though, has been a treasure trove through spring and into summer. Early this week, I was drawn to Jane Gardam's novel Crusoe's Daughter, which has been waiting for several years. The book, originally published in 1985, arrived by post a few years ago with a few others from the Europa Editions, including Old Filth, another novel by Gardam. It too had to wait its turn, richly rewarding my efforts when I finally decided to read it.  Likewise, Crusoe's Daughter hadn't come up in a single book discussion, so I'm not sure why I decided to read it now.

Set in a remote, marshy area of England in the first half of the twentieth century, the novel follows Polly Flint, a motherless child left with her two old aunts when her father leaves for sea, where he dies. Along with Mrs. Woods, their boarder, Polly meets a parade of people, housemaids, delivery boys, the local nuns, and the Ziets, a wealthy German family with children near her age, building a second home nearby.

Despite the title's suggestion, this is not a reimagining of Robinson Crusoe's abandoned offspring. Instead, Polly, who never attends school formally, is taught languages and music by her aunts and Mrs. Woods but spends much of her time reading and rereading Dafoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, eventually translating it into German and French and writing volumes of critical response.

While distanced from both world wars, Polly and the other residents of the Yellow House feel its effects in increasing but subtle measures. Not only does the novel unveil the evolution of Polly's character, but it also examines the structure of the English novel as well.

Crusoe's Daughter exhibits the subtlety one expects from a decidedly English novel, springing clever surprises, playing with language, and sending me searching for a pencil so I can make note of passages I want to recall or to discuss with the next person with whom I share this delightful book.

Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam

The War to End All Wars--and the Next One: The Alice Network and the Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

 I can't always call them coincidences--those occurrences when I find myself encountering similar elements in more than one book I am reading. (For the record, everything I've read recently has mentioned migration patterns of monarch butterflies and the activities of hummingbirds.)

When I started reading Kate Quinn's novel The Alice Network, I was just following up on recommendations from several friends. (Thank you, Mary June!) This novel follows Charlie St. Clair, a flighty American girl who, after coming home from college pregnant, is taken to London by her parents to take care of her "little problem." She has other ideas, though, since her closest cousin has disappeared. She traces her to a crusty anti-social woman with maimed hands who at first   refuses to help her, but then agrees

to pursue leads, driven a handsome, rough-hewn ex-com in her employ.

The story then shifts back and forth between Charlie's search and the back story of Eve Gardiner, who had served as a spy in what was called "The Alice Network" in German-occupied France.

Simultaneously, I had started reading The Impossible Lives of Great Wells by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Andrew Sean Greer. This novel followed a woman who undergoes electro-shock therapy in 1985 after losing her twin brother to AIDS and her lover, who simply leaves her for someone else. As she goes through the series of treatments, she is sent back first to 1918 and next to 1941. While she's the same person, surrounded again by her brother Felix, her lover/husband Nathan, and even her favorite aunt, she sees her live unfold differently each time, set against the back drop of WWI and WWII.

As she moves between lives, she realizes that her other selves are moving into the lives she has left. While I don't like gimmick for gimmick's sake, I enjoyed Greer's take on how one change in our lives can have ripple effects and how changing our time and place can cause changes in us as well.

Both novels--so different from one another--gave me a look at the effect of both great wars both on the front and on the home front.

The War to End All Wars--and the Next One: The Alice Network and the Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

A Different Story from WWII: Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Most book club members I know note that we ended up reading so many books from World War II. We think we've learned all we can about that period of world history--and then something new comes along. Such was the case with Mark Sullivan's tale Beneath the Scarlet Sky, a novel based on the life of Pino Lella, a teenager in Milan thrust into the middle of the war on the Italian front. Sullivan came upon Lella's story at a point when he was doubt his own ability as a writer. By the time they met, Pino was an old man with a full life behind him. The story he shared fills in a part of the war that is often overlook. 

Students of history learn about Mussolini--Il Duce--and the Fascist army, but often forget that the lines drawn are often unclear. As the war was escalating in Europe, Pino's family sent him and his brother Meimo to a Catholic school for boys in the mountains near the Swiss border run by Father Ray. During that time, Pino and his brother were enlisted to help Jews escape through the treacherous mountain passes to safety. They often ran into conflict with partisans who acted more like the Southern Home Guard during the Civil War, using their cause as a front to extort and to kill.

As Pino approached his eighteenth birthday, his father forced him to join the Nazi army to avoid being drafted into the Italian troops who were sent to the Russian border where they were basically cannon fodder. By chance, he ended up as a driver for General Leyers, a Nazi reporting directly to Hitler. This position gave Pino the opportunity to work as a spy, but he had to face the derision of his closest friend and his brother, whom he could not tell the truth.

This is also a love story, as Pino finds that Leyers' mistress's maid Anna is a young woman to whom he had been attracted before he left to join Father Ray. Six years his senior, Anna had a tragic story herself, and as their relationship blossoms, she offers the only light in his life.

Throughout the reading, I am constantly reminded that Pino is a teenager during the course of the story. He sees more death and horror than most people can imagine. Firsthand, he witnesses the Nazis use of slaves for force labor, often working them to death. He also Leyers' receipt of gold bars, presumably put away for safekeeping as insurance for his future at the war's end.

Problematic for some readers is Sullivan's necessity to fill in the details, to imagine conversations, as he reconstructs a life from details he learns decades later. Some questions, particularly relating to Leyers, remain unanswered and troubling. 

I get the overwhelming sense of what it must have been like to balance one's integrity and safety during a time when death was always a possibility. Pino's story also shows readers the lifelong effect of guilt and loss. 

Shortly after 9/11, I once heard an NPR commentator say, "War is how Americans learn geography." Sometimes the geography lesson comes with a history lesson as well.

A Different Story from WWII: Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan: Why I Still Read YA Novels

I keep a running list of reading suggestions from friends, often forgetting exactly from whom the recommendation first arrived. Such is the case with Echo, the Newbery Award-winning novel by Pam Munoz Ryan (author of Esperanza Rising.)

The narrative structure brings to mind books such as The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which traced a Vermeer painting from the most recent owner, back through its numerous owners to the painter himself.

This book, which opens with a fairy tale style of narrative, follows a harmonica from one owner to the next--Frederich, a young boy in Nazi Germany; Mike, trapped in an orphanage with his younger brother; Ivy, the daughter of a migrant worker in California; and Kenneth, a young Japanese-American soldier whose parents are in an internment camp. Each narrative stops at a suspenseful point, with a suggestion of tragedy or disaster; the resolution ties the threads together, explaining the path taken by the harmonica.

Much of the story can be considered a historical novel, exploring the way World War II affected people in a variety of situations and setting. One surprise detail was the existence of harmonica orchestras in America during this time period (perhaps rivaled by ukulele bands today). A real bonus of the audio recording of this novel is the inclusion of a number of lovely songs throughout the story. A major theme of the story is the transformative power of music to heal and to unite. Relationships between parents, children, siblings, and neighbors are also explored through the story.

Ryan follows the tried and true narrative method: get your characters into trouble and see how they get out of it. The young adolescent characters are realistically naive at times. They jump to conclusions and try to take action themselves, often without considering the consequences.

I realize that I read plenty of novels set during World War II, but this one is particularly accessible to younger readers and gives a number of varying viewpoints to these pivotal years in world history. I wish I could remember whom to thank for the recommendation.

Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan: Why I Still Read YA Novels

Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children: It's All about Timing

Readers may be as tired of hearing about my move as I am of the process itself, but the ongoing experience of unpacking and the discovery that results has provided opportunity to muse on certain life concepts. The biggest challenge centers first on what to keep, what to give or throw away; now, though, I am making decisions about what to leave stored in boxes and what to place within reach. I came across a Pampered Chef ice shaver I've had for years and used just once--just in time to entertain my grandsons who are visiting for the week.

Now that I have a few sets of book shelves installed in what can still be called "the box room," I have made the hard decisions about which books earn a spot. Do I shelve the ones I have read and loved, the ones to which I return as references, or the ones I hope to read next? I did a little of all three.

As I finished one book and selected another, in this case for a trip to the beach, I came across Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, a book that I've owned since its publication. I came across it at the NCTE annual convention, where I often discovered good books. I'll confess, I judged the book by its cover. I was drawn to the old black and white photograph of the little girl who, on close observation, appears to be levitating.

The book starts far from the home mentioned in the title, as Jacob, sixteen-year-old boy, responds to a frantic call from his grandfather and finds him in the woods behind his house the victim of a deadly attack. In the aftermath, Jacob suffers from nightmares and spends time with a counselor.  Going through his grandfather's collection of letters and photographs, he is drawn to visit the English island where the man had been sent as a boy escaping the Nazis.

Once he and his father reach the isolated island, he finds himself moving back and forth in time, meeting all the "peculiar" children who lived in the home with his grandfather before the man chose to leave to fight against the German forces in WWII. At this point, author Ransom Riggs moves back and forth between realism and fantasy as Jacob is drawn into the challenge facing the children who have been living and reliving the same day the island was bombed by Nazi forces.

The conclusion begs for a sequel, and since I waited to read the book, I don't have to wait for the sequel to be written. I particularly look forward to the photographs, which I learned at the end of the book, are real photographs from several collections. My first instinct is to start looking for this kind of photos at antique stores. But then I'd have to find somewhere to store them.

Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children: It's All about Timing