The Last Hope (A Maggie Hope Mystery #11) by Susan Elia MacNeal

The Last Hope: A Maggie Hope Mystery
by Susan Elia MacNeal

I'm a little on the OCD side and although I closed The Children's War in December 2023, I find I can't not review the final book in the Maggie Hope series. So here goes...

The Last Hope is the eleventh and final (?) book in Susan Elia MacNeal's wonderful WWII mystery series featuring Maggie Hope. Maggie has had some scary adventures since the war began and she became an SOE agent to do her bit, but her final mission may just be the most difficult.

It’s January 1944 and no sooner has Maggie returned from Los Angeles with the love of her life, John Sterling, then she gets an early morning call from Kim Philly, head of the Iberian Section of MI-6. Word is that the Germans are working on a fission bomb that could erase a whole city from the face of the earth and it is suspected the Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer in quantum theory, may be behind their research. Maggie’s new mission is to travel to Madrid, Spain under the alias Paige Kelly (see Mr. Churchill's Secretary, Maggie Hope #1), where Heisenberg is giving a lecture and to assassinate him. But Maggie being the mathematician that she is decides that she needs to determine whether the Nazis have such a bomb or not. If they do, Heisenberg dies, if not, he lives.

Realizing that the war is not going well, and since Allied demand for an unconditional surrender is not an option, it is decided by Heinrich Himmler and General Walter Schellenberg that Germany’s only hope of survival would depend on negotiating a separate peace with the Allies sans that Soviet Union. The hope is this would keep communism out of western Europe. And now that information about the Final Solution is leaking out, one of their bargaining chips would be the lives of the remaining Jews. And Schellenberg has just the right contacts for getting the offer of a separate peace into the hands of Winston Churchill: Axis spies Coco Chanel and her current amor, Hans von Dincklage will be traveling to Madrid on the pretext of hearing Heisenberg’s lecture.

It turn out that Maggie as Paige Kelly owes Coco a favor after she saved Maggie’s life back in 1942 (see The Paris Spy, Maggie Hope #7) and Coco has every intention of calling the favor in, insisting that Maggie/Paige personally deliver the peace proposal including a handwritten letter from Coco herself directly into the hands of Winston Churchill.

And, of course, Maggie being Maggie, she attracts the attention of the famous bull fighter Juanito Belamonte, whose fame gives him all kinds of useful connections so that he can unwittingly help Maggie.

There's a lot going in in this novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Does Maggie assassinate Heisenberg? Obviously not (not a spoiler), but she has some very interesting conversations with him about quantum theory and his uncertainty principal. And the whole time she is carrying out her mission, Maggie has her personal life and her relationship with John Sterling very much on her mind.

The Last Hope was a bittersweet read. It was so good that I could hardly put it down, but then again, I didn’t want to finish it and say good bye to Maggie and her friends. I found it particularly interesting since I’ve take quantum theory courses and really thought that MacNeal did an excellent job making it accessible for those of us who are not physicists or mathematicians.

The story is loaded with names of real people and I found myself going to the internet to find out more about them. In fact, all the Maggie Hope books have been like that and I like a historical novel that gets my curiosity going. MacNeal is so great at incorporating her research seamlessly into her stories.

I’m going to miss Maggie, but I can highly recommend each and every one of her wartime adventures, but by 1944, she has certainly done more than her bit for the war effort.

So, good-bye, Maggie, good luck and marry John Sterling as soon as possible.

Thank you to Ballantine/RH and NetGalley for allowing me to read this E-ARC.

January 2023

I haven’t been blogging much lately and I have decided to take a break from it for a while. I began The Children’s War in 2010 because I had finished my dissertation on girls’ popular fiction in Nazi Germany and had been thinking a lot about #kidlit and how the adults who write it can have such an influence on the thinking of young readers. At around the same time, I became a member of the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee and was reading so many good books, I began Randomly Reading in 2012. I have enjoyed working on both blogs, but I feel like I need to take some time off. I hope to be back in the early spring of 2023. In the meantime, you can still find me on Goodreads, Twitter, Instagram, and Post.

My Own Lighting by Lauren Wolk

It's 1944 and WWII is still being fought far from the home front in this sequel to Wolf Hollow. Annabelle McBride, 13, is finding it hard to move on from the events of the past winter when she tried to save her friend Toby, a homeless, shell shocked WWI veteran, from the cruelty of a girl named Betty Glengarry. Now, summer vacation has just started and Annabelle has promised to help her teacher clean up the schoolhouse for next September. While there, an unpleasant stranger named Drake Graf shows up looking for his lost dog Zeus. And just as Annabelle and Mrs. Taylor are leaving the schoolhouse, not only to they hear thunder in the distance, but Andy Woodbury, Betty's partner in crime, is not far away watching them.

As Annabelle is walking home, the storm begins and a lightning strike hits her, knocking her out and stopping her heart. But then someone appears, pounding her chest and getting her heart started again, before they run off and Annabelle is carried home by someone else. When she regains consciousness, she doesn't remember who helped her , but her senses - smell, hearing, vision - are so heightened her brothers call them superpowers. The morning after the lightning strike, as Annabelle's petting their dog Hunter, she is overcome with a strong sense of real peace. Then, she learns that her brother's dog Buster is missing and that Andy Woodbury has been living in their potato house with Mr. McBride's permission after he was badly beaten at home. Later, Annabelle realizes she knows animals better than before and in a whole new way. 

Being able to understand animals and feel what they feel proves to be very useful as more dogs begin to disappear. Animals are so much easier to understand than people are for animal-loving Annabelle. And so she sets out to try and discover where the missing dogs are, often in the contentious company of Andy Woodbury, while also trying to solve the mystery of who saved her life. In the course of all this, Annabelle meets the newly arrived to the area Mr. Edelman and his reclusive daughter Nora, who has her own healing to do and who has been secretly taking in injured and sick animals in need of attention that her father finds.   

Annabelle had just wanted to put the traumatic events caused by Betty and Andy behind her, but she soon learns that she must reconsider some things in order to come to terms with those events. She had never wanted to see Andy again, but after learning about the abuse he is subjected to at home and also seeing how kind and gentle he is with animals, Annabelle is forced to reconsider her feelings toward him. Annabelle and Andy are both very flawed characters but their individual journeys - one towards forgiveness, the other towards redemption - show us that we don't always know people as well as we think we do. I know it sounds like there's a lot of disparate threads running through this coming of age novel, but they do all come together in the end. And although Annabelle's journey includes references to Wolf Hollow, it is not absolutely necessary to have read that first novel to understand this one. 

My Own Lightning is a wonderfully layered novel that tackles themes of abuse, family, friendship, family, and acceptance and an excellent sequel to Wolf Hollow.

Yonder by Ali Standish

In 1940, Danny Timmons was 10 and living in a small Appalachian town called Foggy Gap the first time he really noticed Jack Bailey. Jack had rescued toddler twins caught in the floodwaters after the Watauga River burst its banks during a powerful rain storm. 

Three years later, Danny is almost 13, Jack is almost 16, and World War II is raging far from Foggy Gap and yet still touching the lives of its residents. Danny's father was only one of the men who had left for the war and now residents of Foggy Gap are doing all sorts of jobs men used to do. Danny and Jack have been delivering newspapers all over town for a year and a half now. But one summer morning in 1943, Jack never shows up for his share of the papers, so Danny delivers all of them, surprised since he knew Jack and his father really needed the money he brought home. 

Danny had always been bullied by Bruce Pittman and his pal Logan Abbot until one day in 1941 Jack had come to his rescue and became Danny's personal hero. Now, worried that Jack hadn't shown up to deliver papers. Danny and his mother, who was a reporter for the newspaper, drive out to see if he's alright. Jack lives with his father in a cabin with no indoor plumbing or electricity in the woods. His father, known for his temper and cruelty, isn't at all concerned that Jack has been missing since the day before, saying he is probably hunting, and chases them off his property.

Danny has reason to be worried about Jack. Back in December 1941, Jack had shown up at the newspaper office with swollen eyes, a bloody nose and bruises on his body. Jack stayed with the Timmons until Christmas, when his father came to get him. It was now also clear that Jack's father beat him on a fairly regular basis.  

With Mr. Timmons away at war, Jack and Danny become more than friends, with Jack mentoring Danny the way a father would. Jack also shares stories with Danny that his mother used to tell him, especially about a place called Yonder, an idyllic town with no trouble and no war. Naturally, when Jack goes missing, Danny is sure he has run away to Yonder and sets out to discover where it is and to bring Jack back home. 

While Jack's story plays out, so does the stories about Lou, Danny's former best friend, as girl obsessed with Nancy Drew, and Widow Wagner, a woman of German descent who, according to Bruce Pittman, was hiding Germans who has escaped POW camps and plotting an attack on the town. 

Yonder is a home front story and as the author writes in her Historical Notes, "...not many books have focused on the American homefront." And she's right - we don't know all that much about how Americans lived even though they were greatly impacted by the war. And yes, she has included the usual things like rationing, collecting scrap, women taking on men's jobs (Mrs. Timmons, who is pregnant, took over her husband's job at the newspaper), blue or gold stars hanging in the windows of families with soldiers in the war. But two things set this novel apart for me. The first is her interrogation of the idea of what makes a person a hero. And as Danny learns through Jack and his story it isn't always what we think it means. Second, Standish dispels the long held belief that Americans didn't know what was happening to the Jews in Europe. The headline WARSAW that Danny sees in an article his mother is reading in New Republic magazine, referring to the Warsaw Uprising, sparks a conversation about why the Jewish genocide isn't included in the media, something Mrs. Timmons tries to rectify in their local paper. 

Yonder is told in the first person present by Danny with recurring flashbacks that detail both his and Jack's story and friendship. Danny is a compelling narrator and keeps the story moving along very nicely. Through him and his keen observations, the novel explores themes of bullying, racism, abuse, bravery, courage, outsiders, family and friendships. 

The Librarian of Auschwitz: The Graphic Novel based on the Novel by Antonio Iturbe, adapted by Salva Rubio, illustrated by Loreto Aroca, and translated by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites

Available January 3, 2023

I loved reading comics as a kid and I wasn't above reading a Classic Comic or two or maybe more instead of the book the comic was based on. In school, I was an undiagnosed dyslexic and reading was sometimes difficult. So it stands to reason that as an adult and a teacher, I'm a big fan of books done in graphic format. They are just what some readers need instead of a large and for them, for whatever reasons, unwieldy novel. And for others, they are just a fun way to read. But, the graphic needs to be well done, and in today's world, most of the time, they are. Which is why is pains me to say that I did not like The Librarian of Auschwitz: The Graphic Novel.

This graphic novel is the same story as the novel by the same name and written by Antonio Iturbe, so I'm not going to summarize it again. Suffice it to say it is the story of teenage Dita Adlerova, who was first sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia with her parents and other Jews, and who were all later transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, they were living in a separate area of Birkenau, called BIIb and referred to as the Theresienstadt Family Camp. These Jewish prisoners were allowed to keep their clothing and their hair wasn't shaved, though living conditions were still as deplorable as in other parts of Auschwitz. If you haven't read the novel, you can read what I originally wrote HERE. The novel is a big book but one that is totally worth spending time with, IMHO. 

Back to the graphic. First, let me begin by saying I did like the art. I found the full color cells were clearly and cleanly drawn in such a way that it was easy to follow the story. The illustrator did a great job at capturing the full range of intense emotions felt by the prisoners of Auschwitz as well as the hate and disgust exhibited by their Nazi captors. Interestingly, none of the characters, Jewish, gay, or Nazi, were portrayed as stereotypical. 

And it wasn't so much that I found the graphic novel to be bad, just lacking. I read the novel back in 2017 and so I'd forgotten some details. Reading the graphic, I found myself confused about a few of the things that went on in Auschwitz and that impacted the main character, Dita, personally. I also didn't feel the importance of the eight books that made up the library was made plain, and how Dita so lovingly cared for them, nor did I feel the reverence with which the borrowers of these books felt for them. 

Some of the characters, like Dita and Fredy Hirsch, as based on the actual people, and of course, so are some of the Nazis like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death for his experiments of the prisoners in Auschwitz. There is a great epilogue at the end of the book that does go into detail not just about what happened and the people involved.

Ultimately, though, I found this version of The Librarian of Auschwitz to be simplistic and a little stiff. I realize that taking a large novel and synthesizing it down to just 144 pages is not easy task and this was a valiant effort. It just didn't work for me.