Review of All the Little Hopes

Weiss, Leah.  All the Little Hopes.  Sourcebooks, 2021.

 

In 1943, thirteen-year-old Allie “Bert” Tucker is sent by her poor father on a bus trip across North Carolina to stay with her pregnant Aunt Violet and help with her forthcoming baby.  However, through a series of circumstances, Bert ends up living with thirteen-year-old Lucy “Lu” Brown and her large family, instead.  Not only do Lu and Bert become best friends, but they also become sisters.  Because Bert is illiterate, Lu and her mother teach Bert how to read, write, and do arithmetic.

 

The Brown family lives on a tobacco farm in Riverton, NC and also has a thriving beekeeping and honey business.  In exchange for cane sugar and cash, the Browns agree to provide the US government with beeswax and honey from their hives.  Not only do family members help with working the hives, but neighbors and close friends chip in, as well.  

 

A Nazi POW camp is built on the outskirts of Riverton, and many of the townspeople are distrustful of the prisoners.  One Riverton resident, Terrell Stuckey, is particularly disturbed and sits outside the camp whittling all day.  Three of the prisoners are working on the Brown’s farm as part of their rehabilitation.  When a double murder takes place at the camp, everyone thinks that Terrell did it, but he can’t be located.  

 

Terrell Stuckey is the third man to go missing in Riverton.  Lu and Bert, who are avid Nancy Drew fans, decide to try to find out what has happened to the men.  They engage the help of Trula Freed, an eccentric neighbor, and Lu’s rich Aunt Fanniebelle and her Ouija board, which the girls name “Weegee”.  However, the mysteries remain unsolved until a close friend’s death, when Lu, Bert, and Helen, one of Lu’s older sisters, make a surprising discovery.

 

All the Little Hopes is a delightful read, filled with nostalgia, small town life, and love of family and friends.  The book contains short chapters and is told in the alternating voices of Lu and Bert.  The novel sails along while World War II is going on in the background, quietly affecting the town and the Brown family.

 

The characters, even the minor ones, are extremely well-thought out.  I love the whole Brown family, but especially the parents, Minnie and David.  They are caring parents and calming forces in their children’s lives.  Several of the characters very quirky, which adds to the charm of the novel.  Trula Freed, the town’s mystic, reads tarot cards, provides medicine for a variety of ailments, and seems to be clairvoyant.  Lu’s Aunt Fanniebelle, who is quite wealthy and lives in a mansion, gets her words mixed up, which makes her stories hilarious.  I also love that Lu and her whole family are bibliophiles, and they turn Bert into one, too.

 

Readers will be able to tell that Ms. Weiss has done her research, as she inserts historical anecdotes into the story.  The POW camp in the book is based on a similar one she was able to locate in Williamston, NC.  Other factual truths in the novel are the World War II beeswax contracts, the disappearance of band leader Glen Miller, the 1918 Spanish Flu, and folklore wolpertingers from Bavaria.  She has also provided recipes in the back of the book matching those in the novel.

 

There is a “Conversation with the Author” in the back of the book, where the author answers questions about her life growing up, beekeeping, Nancy Drew, the importance of reading, and the development of her characters.  She has also provided a “Reading Group Guide” containing questions and author’s notes explaining how the book came about.

 

All the Little Hopes is a charming, heartfelt, and touching read.  While it is written for young adults, it would be enjoyed by adults, as well.  Hand this book to readers who enjoy stories about family and friendship and World War II.  I highly recommend it for high school and public libraries and give it five out of five fleur de lis!

 

Thank you to Edelweiss and Sourcebooks for allowing me to read and review this book!

Review of The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

Harmel, Kristin.  The Book of Lost Names.  Gallery Books, 2020.

 

In 1942, while babysitting a neighbor’s children, Eva Traube secretly sees her father, who is a Polish Jew, arrested when the Nazis begin picking up the Jews in Paris.  Realizing the danger, she and her mother flee to Aurignon, a city in the Free Zone of southern France, while Eva works on a plan to free her father.   Instead, Eva becomes part of the French Resistance of World War II, working with a covert forging group that creates documents to help Jewish children escape across the French border to Switzerland.  The forging ring is run in the library of the Eglise Saint-Alban Church and is headed by Pere’ Clement, a Catholic priest.  Nearly the whole town is involved in the underground forging ring, and many of them have an alias just in case they are caught.

 

Eva is trained by another forger, Remy, and they decide that the children who are taken across the border need to be remembered by their real names.  They begin encoding the children’s names and aliases in a rare book, Epitres et Evangiles.  Eventually, Remy and Eva fall in love, and Remy begins bringing children across the border instead of forging documents.  The Nazis finally learn of their secret operation, and the pair flees Aurignon, escorting children into Switzerland.  In the process, Remy and Eva part ways.

 

Years later, in 2005, Eva Abrams, now widowed, is working as a part-time librarian at the public library in Winter Park, Florida.  She notices a New York Times newspaper article about a man named Otto Kuhn, a librarian who lives in Berlin.  His life’s mission is to return a million books looted from libraries by the Nazis, to their rightful Jewish owners.  In the article, she sees her book, Eptres et Evangiles, and knows she must travel to Berlin to obtain the book.  She hopes that Remy has left a coded message for her in the book and wants closure from World War II, which took so much from her and her family.

 

In The Book of Lost Names, Kristin Harmel has combined World War II history and the French Resistance with romance, suspense, and mystery.  The story is compelling, hopeful, and filled with hope and perseverance.  It is an honest portrayal of what people’s lives are like when their freedoms are taken away.  It is evident that the author did meticulous research on the forging rings and the libraries that were looted during World War II.

 

Not just Eva, but all the female characters, including the boarding house owner and other townspeople, are portrayed as strong and courageous.  It is heartwarming and astonishing to see how a whole Catholic town works together to benefit hundreds of innocent Jewish children.

 

This novel received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.  Hand it to readers who enjoy historical fiction and to fans of World War II stories.  I highly recommend it for public libraries and give it five out of five fleur de lis!

 

Thank you to Edelweiss and Gallery Books for allowing me to read and review this book.

Review of Once by Morris Gleitzman

Once by Morris Gleitzman; Henry Holt, 2010, c2005.

Felix, the son of Jewish bookstore owners, is dropped off at a Polish Catholic orphanage when he is six-years-old. They explain to Felix that he must stay at the orphanage while they expand their book business. Nearly four years later, he is still waiting for his parents to return, and World War II is in full swing. One day, Felix sees strange, ominous men burning books in the courtyard of the orphanage and is afraid that these strangers are looking for his parents in order to burn their books. Determined to warn his parents, he escapes from the safety of the orphanage where he has been sheltered from the war and the Holocaust. On his journey, Felix is shot at by Nazis, finds out new owners have moved into his family home, and is called names and chased out of town. When he reaches the ghetto, where he thinks his parents have gone, he saves a young girl and experiences more Nazi cruelty. Shortly thereafter, he is befriended by Barney, a dentist, who takes Felix and some other children into hiding. Ultimately, the group is discovered and forced onto a train bound for the death camps.

What a riveting story! Told through the eyes of Felix, who happens to be a fabulous writer and teller of his own stories, readers see how being sheltered in an orphanage has led to Felix’s naiveté and ignorance about the war, the Holocaust, and the Nazi movement. He has been led to believe, even by the priest, that Adolf Hitler is a kind man. The way that Felix describes the unfolding events has a humorous side, even though they deal with a depressing subject. He is shocked when he sees Nazis killing innocent people “over books”! Every chapter begins with “Once”…as Felix describes something that has happened to him. The title of the book actually comes from a line that Barney utters: “Everyone deserves to have something good in their life at least once.” The author indicates in endnotes that Barney is a veiled reference to Janus Korczak, who actually helped run an orphanage for Jewish children for many years.

I cannot say enough good things about this book. Most accounts of the Holocaust are written through the eyes of an adult. It is refreshing to see the same events through the eyes of a child. I highly recommend this book for middle school, high school, and public libraries! Note* Once was previously published in 2005 in Australia. The cover art is stunning!