The Summer of Lost Letters by Hannah Reynolds

When a box of her O'ma's stuff arrives at the house addressed to her mother, Abby Schoenberg, 17, can't resist opening it. Inside, she finds a stack of love letters addressed to her O'ma, Ruth Goldman, living in New York City from someone named Edward living on Nantucket island, and who refuses to send Ruth a necklace she has asked to be returned to her. Not knowing much about her O'ma's past other than that she came alone from Germany as a 4-year-old shortly after Kristallnacht. Now, Abby is determined to discover more about her O'ma's life - who is Edward, why was he writing love letters to her in the 1950s and what happened to the necklace, which her Grandmother obviously never got back. 

After doing some research, Abby discovers the letter writer is Edward Barbanel, who mentions a place called Golden Doors on Nantucket. Luckily, Abby lands a job working in a bookstore on the island, and a room shared with a girl named Jane, with whom she immediately becomes friends. And yes, everyone she meets knows the very wealthy Barbanel family, who are having a party at which Abby is invited to help serve. Naturally, her curiosity overcomes her and she is caught snooping around by Noah Barbanel, 18 and the handsome grandson of Edward. 

To try to keep his family's personal business private and to protect his grandparents, Noah agrees to help Abby with her search to discover more about her O'ma and her family history. O'ma never talked about her parents and all the Schoenberg's knew was that they have perished in Auschwitz, but who they were and where they lived had always been a mystery. 

In between her job at the bookstore and her attempts to discover more about her O'ma, there are parties on the beach, sailing, ice cream and new friends, even Shabbat dinner with the Barbanel family. Abby hadn't been looking forward to this summer with her friends away, but decides to take the advice of best friend Niko who tells her to go crazy, be bold, have some chutzpah. And that is just what Abby does. 

The Summer of Lost Letters is a contemporary romance with some interesting historical fiction and some interesting historical facts throughout the novel and Reynolds has incorporated it all easily into the story. I thought it was interesting how she introduced some of the chapters with Edward's love letters almost as a portend of what is going to happen. I also thought that never getting to know who Ruth Goldman responded to the letters or what she felt was a great way to keep the mystery going. Of course, readers can  surmise her feelings for Edward by the fact of keeping the letters, despite having married another man (whom she did in fact love, too). 

At first the tension and bickering in between getting along really well was kind of fun as Abby and Noah dances around their attraction to each other. But after a certain point, I honestly felt that this could have used some editing when I found myself muttering "oh my God, own it already." Others may find this kind of dance appealing.  

In the end. all is revealed and I never saw it coming - and I really liked that. The end could come across as a little to pat, but that was fine with me. After all, this is a great summer romance to read, enjoy, and learn a few things.

This book is recommend for readers age 12+

This book was an eARC gratefully received from NetGalley

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, and Steven Scott, illustrated by Harmony Becker

My brother and I used to watch Star Trek reruns religiously. We were too young to know about WWII and this country's treatment of Japanese Americans, and their relatives who were born in Japan but unable to become American citizens. Which isn't surprising since they didn't teach it in school, either. But you know what they say about history, if you don't ignore it, you are bound to repeat it. And sure enough, as this book shows, we have. But we also are learning more about people's experiences in the WWII Japanese American internment camps, in both fiction and nonfiction. And now, we have heard from George Takei, helmsman Hikaru Sulu on the old Star Trek shows, witty social media commentator, political activist, and most importantly, outspoken critic and survivor of America's internment camps. 

Realizing that most Americans do not really know much about what happened to the Japanese Americans in WWII, Takei first turned his wartime experiences into a Broadway musical called Allegiance in 2015. The play centers on a family, much like Takei's own, sent an internment camp in Wyoming and their different reactions to being imprisoned behind barbed wire and watched by armed guards. 

In addition to Allegiance, George Takei has written an excellent, detailed graphic memoir, that is more accessible and ideal for young readers to learn about this dark part of American history from someone who lived it. Structured as a Ted Talk being given by Takei, as well as an interview with NPR, it begins in the middle of the night as their father wakes George and his older brother Henry up and tells them to quickly get dressed. followed by a knock on the front door of their home by two armed guards in 1942. Executive Order 9066 had been signed by President Roosevelt and all people of Japanese descent were being rounded up to be sent to prison camps. 

Losing their successful dry cleaning business, and forced to practically give away their possessions, the Takei's are first sent to the Santa Anita Racetrack. There,  they were housed in former horse stalls until October 1942, when they were sent to Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, and later to Tule Lake, California. 

Jumping back and forth between the 1940s and the present allows Takei to contextualize the personal with the public, the past with the present, giving a much broader picture than just one person's memoir, increasing it relevancy for today's readers. He does this by including specific people and events, such as his own early activism with Martin Luther King, the 1998 awarding of the Medal of Honor to veterans of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, and Fred Korematsu, his conviction for refusing to obey Executive Order 9066, and his subsequent lawsuits claiming there was racial bias attached to the Order. Fred's conviction was thrown out, but not the Order. Sadly, Takai brings readers into the present with the Supreme Court striking down the Korematsu decision under Trump v. Hawaii, allowing the United States to once more discriminate against a particular people - asylum seekers from Mexico and South American put in cages, as well as the controversial Muslim ban, disallowing Muslims to enter the United States. 

But the main part of Takei's narrative is what happened to his family. He has really captured how degrading, how humiliating and painful an experience it was for his parents, who tried their best to shield their children from the grim reality of what was happening. 

I think the most poignant part of the memoir is the government's realization that they had an abundant source of potential soldiers in the camps, but only if they proved their loyalty. Takei's father struggles with the two questions #28 and #29  regarding where one's loyalty lay - United States or Japan. Answering yes to both questions got you in the army, answering no got you a train ride to Tule Lake, a harsh internment camp for those whose loyalty was questionable. The Takei's were sent there in 1944.   

The illustrations are done in comic book style, and rendered in black, white and shade of gray giving is a kind of cold starkness that describes this part of American history so accurately. 

Pair They Called Us Enemy with Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo and Fred Korematsu Speaks Up by Laura Atkins and Stan Yogi.

You can find a useful Teacher's Guide courtesy of the publisher Random House HERE

This book is recommended for readers age 12+

This book was purchased for my personal library

The Paper Girl of Paris by Jordyn Taylor

In this novel told in alternating voices, one in the present, one is the past, the lives of two teenage girls have interesting parallels. 

No one was more surprised than 16-year-old New Jersey native Alice Prewitt to discover she had inherited an apartment in Paris' 9th Arrondissement from her beloved Gram, Chloe. Surprised because it is an apartment that had oddly never ever been mentioned, not to Alice, nor to Gram's daughter, Alice's mother. And it's not just any apartment, as Alice, her mom and dad discover, but what turns out to be a virtual time capsule of her Gram's family from the 1930s and 1940s. And the surprises don't stop there.

Going through some old photos in the apartment, Alice discovers that her Gram also had a sister named Adalyn Bonhomme that no one knew about. But why had Gram never mentioned a sister or the at-one-time-so-elegant apartment? Returning to the apartment a few days later to do more exploring, Alice is excited to find Adalyn's diary which she had begun on May 30, 1940. Writing about the Nazi occupation of France, Adalyn sounds ready to resist however she can.  But when Alice finds some magazine clippings with happy pictures of Adalyn dressed in high fashion and partying and a newspaper photo to her sitting in an expensive restaurant with six men wearing Nazi armbands, she finds her discoveries hard to process. Could Adalyn have been a Nazi collaborator? 

Yet, the deeper Alice digs into the lives of the Bonhomme family during the war, the clearer a picture of a dysfunctional family emerges. Adalyn and Chloe's father is a WWI veteran who suffers from PTSD, has basically withdrawn from life, and everyone must tiptoe around him so as not to upset him. Their mother is the image of privilege, buying costly rationed items on the black market, and attending society parties. The two sisters are very close, but as Adalyn's wartime resistance activities increase, she worries that Chloe's outspokenness and her distain for the Nazis will jeopardize the family. Meanwhile, she finds herself very attracted to Luc who is the leader of her resistance group, and who doesn't seem to feel the same attraction for Adalyn.

Alice's family is just as dysfunctional. The family tiptoes around Alice's mother's depression.  It's understandable that she would be depressed after just losing her mother, and then discovering the Paris apartment was left to her daughter instead of her, but it's also clear she has been depressed off and on Alice's whole life. I thought her father was kind of passive, content to wait out his wife's depressions, not wanting to upset her and waiting for her to ask for help, which she never does. As Alice says her "family's first language is small talk" so important issues are never addressed. Sadly, he doesn't seem to see what this is doing to Alice. Alice retreats to a cafe to do her family research,where she meets her love interest Paul, a student and aspiring artist. 

I really wanted to like The Paper Girl of Paris more than I did. But I felt there was just too much going on and it began to feel chaotic. I would have loved a story about Adalyn, her family and her resistance work. I really liked all of the historical elements in Adalyn's part of the story and how the diary gives a nice picture of life, which is then expanded in Adalyn's own narration. I think that these two things easily could have been presented without Alice's intervention.

So I'm sorry to say that I could have lived without Alice's story all together. She just wasn't as compelling a character as Adalyn. I thing Alice's story would make a nice novel about a contemporary girl dealing with a passive father and depressed mother. Her character turns the book into something of a mystery that needs solving, but it could have just as easily unfolded with that. I just felt that in The Paper Girl of Paris, she added nothing beyond being a plot device to get to Adalyn's more interesting story and her narration felt intrusive.   

Should you read The Paper Girl of Paris? Yes, if you like historical fiction wrapped in a mystery. 

This book is recommended for readers age 13+

This book was borrowed from the Queens Public Library

The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II by Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen is a beloved British children's book author, perhaps most well-known for the picture book We're Going on a Bear Hunt (1989). Now, he has written a book about a personal journey he took to discover what happened to his Jewish relatives that had been living in Europe and who disappeared during World War II and the Holocaust.

Rosen begins with some informative history about his family. His mother's family had lived in London, and as a young boy, Michael loved visiting them and going out for bagels with his Zeyde (grandad in Yiddish) or shopping with his Bubbe (granny in Yiddish). His great grandparents on this side came from Poland and his grandmother Rose had been born in England. When she married, she and her husband Morris moved to the United States, which is why Michael's dad is American. But when the marriage ended, she returned to London. During the war, his dad was an American soldier, and growing up, Michael loved to hear his stories about his time as a soldier.

Grandad Morris had one brother Max who also emigrated to the United States, and six other siblings, four of whom remained in Poland and two who emigrated to France. Whenever young Michael would ask what happened to the six siblings, his dad would answer "I don't know...They were there at the beginning of the war, but they had gone by the end. I suppose they died in the camps."

Michael Rosen's Family Tree. Click to enlarge

A brief recounting of Hitler, the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews followed this brief family history. Because of an early interest in France and French, Michael decided he first wanted to learn more about the fate of his two uncles, Oscar and Martin, who had lived there before the war. At first, he didn't find much, but then his cousin Teddy in the United States sent him two letters that had been written by his great Uncle Oscar. This was the opening Michael hoped for.

Click to enlarge

He spent the next several years trying to find out just what happened, and while Michael didn't find all the answers to his questions, he did find enough so that his relatives would no longer be simply "missing" but will be remembered and memorialized not just in this book, and in his poetry, but the names Martin  and Oscar are now on the commemorative wall at the Museum of the Shoah in Paris. Michael Rosen's journey is poignant, heartbreaking and personal, and in the end, his young readers will be able to  look at and understanding history through one family's experience. And it is all told in simple, clear and accessible language.

Interspersed in this family history are poems that Michael Rosen has written over the years about his relatives while he was searching for the missing members and which are strategically placed throughout. There is a humorous poem called "Bagel" is about going out for bagels with his Zeyde, while a poem called "Dear Oscar" affectively imagines what his ride in a cattle car to Auschwitz might have been like.

The book ends on a hopeful note that today's children will develop empathy and understanding towards other people, especially those who are different from themselves, and not fall for the racist, xenophobic rhetoric that is once again on the rise throughout the world.

There is really extensive back matter that includes a Bibliography of first hand accounts and other nonfiction books  about WWII and the Holocaust, recommended fiction for young readers, fiction and nonfiction recommendations about today's refugees.

The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II is the perfect accompaniment for anyone interested in the war, the Holocaust, and it is especially recommended for anyone studying these units in the classroom or being home schooled. I can't recommend it highly enough.

This book is recommended for readers age 10+
This book was purchased for my personal library from Book Depository, however, I understand Candlewick Press will be publishing it in the United States on September 8, 2020.