The Children's War (Thorndike Press Large Print Core Series)

Rating:
Summary: Real suspense
Review:

In 1939, Ilse Blumenthal's mother scrapes enough money together to send her 13-year-old daughter to her brother in Morocco. In most books this would be the end of the story, but Ilse's life is not so simple. The small, shy girl has a Jewish father and a "pure" Aryan mother, and her father is not only Jewish, he's a communist who has rarely been around. In Morocco, her kind uncle becomes the father she has always wanted but this paradise cannot last. As the war develops, Ilse is sent to her father in Paris and so begins her journey to survive a in a world where the most solid ground can turn to quicksand at any minute.

In Hamburg, her mother finds work as a nanny for friends of her brother. She forms a bond with Nicolai, a boy her daughter's age. Through Ilse and Nicolai we see the world coming apart and two children forced into roles that a sane universe would never ask them to play. The result is a very suspenseful book where like Ilse and Nicolai, you never know what will happen next.

With our fabulous hindsight we often wonder why people-especially Jews-didn't get out of Germany while they could. "Children's War" brings home the tangle of loyalties, loves, hopefulness, and plain disbelief kept people waiting for things to get better. And then opportunities to leave were cut off even before the war began.

I understand from British reviews that this book may be the first of a trilogy. Great. I want to find out how Nicolai and Ilse, if they survive the war, survive the peace.


Rating:
Summary: Appallingly Written
Review: Rarely have I had to abandon a book but within 28 pages I thought either this was either some sort of literally joke or I needed to read this book upside down. The killer blow came with the following turgid and ridiculous description of a meal time: "Nicholai made fortifications with his potatoes,forked waves into a gravy moat.Caraway seed men attacked and defended; the sausage battering ram won through.Madga had saved a portion of fruit compote for him. She ladled cream.He plunged a spoon through the white lake to the red current depths,then swirled the two into a Catherine wheel." Good grief. Dont bother-if you want to read a story of children in WW2 then there have got to be better options than this completely overcooked tripe

Rating:
Summary: thought-provoking and compelling: a wonderful book
Review: This book is all the more moving for its lack of sentimentality. While the big picture of the horrors of war and the nature of evil is terrifying, it is very much a story of two young people trying to work out the world around them.

Told in alternate chapters from the perspectives of a girl and boy who are at the outset twelve years old, it always leaves you wanting to know more. The characters are wonderfully likeable and the deceptively simple style adeptly captures their changing perspectives as they grow up. The novel is at moments life-affirmingly charming and romantic.

Impossible to put down, well-paced, and suspenseful. Not a word wasted. One of the most powerful books I have ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Magical, life-affirming
Review: This book's beauty of language and imagery simply takes one's breath away. Its heroes are understated, its rights of passage unpretentious, its moments of insight so profound that they stop you dead in your tracks. At the end, its emotional impact is almost overwhelming. A book which conveys what it is to be human, this is a fully-formed work from a fully-formed writer. Ilse asks at the end, "Who'll tell the story of the children?" Monique Charlesworth has - and how.

Rating:
Summary: Coming of age during the war
Review: This is a great novel that I strongly recommend. It's a coming-of-age story, but it's also a story of World War II. Charlesworth does an excellent job of bringing to life the years of the war from the point of view of two children who turn into teenagers and ultimately adults during the conflict. This is not the war of statesmen and soldiers. It's war as it affects regular kids and regular people--people with little knowledge or understanding of what their leaders are doing. As readers, we can easily feel the confusion, fear, uncertainty, and pain of the protagonists. Ilse, the half-Jewish girl, just wants to be with her mother; Nicolai, the German boy, has no interest in being a Nazi or fighting for the Fuhrer. But war will test them without regard for their hopes or their young age.

Charlesworth doesn't shy away from describing some of the horrors of the war. But there's nothing gratuitous here, and Charlesworth stays away from tearjerking scenes. If I have one complaint, it's that the initial setup of the book--the parallel stories of Ilse and Nicolai--is not continued throughout the book. Gradually, we read more and more about Ilse and less about Nicolai. This is really Ilse's story, and some readers will wish that the Nicolai character had been given the same depth as Ilse. By the end of the book, the Nicolai character becomes almost irrelevant. The book could stand on its own just as a story of Ilse. But this is a minor complaint. Overall, the novel is a great read.