Ole! Bloggiesta is Here!

I am so glad Bloggiesta has come round again.  I kept putting off some needed housekeeping tasks, telling myself I would do it during Bloggiesta.  Well, now it is here so here are my 2012 goals:

1- Add a Favicon This may or may not show up one of these days.
2- Fix my grab button

3- Revisit Polices and About Me page

4- Clean up Google Reader and RSS feed
5- Learn how to use Pinterest more effectively with a Mini-Challenge hosted by Joy’s Book Blog 

6- Clean up labels with a Mini-Challenge hosted by BethFishReads 

7- Set up a rating system with the how-to as part of the Mini-Challenge hosted by The Bluestocking Society 

8- Make some pages with a Mini-Challenge hosted by Charlotte’s Library

9- Fix up my Facebook page as part of a Mini-Challenge hosted by Sockets and Lightbulbs

And last but not least, remember to

    Make new friends,

    Keep the old,

    One is silver,

    The other is gold.
A big Thank You to all the kind people hosting the various new Bloggiesta Mini-Challenges, all of which you can find at It's All About Books 
and, of course, flashback Bloggiesta challenges can be found at There's a Book

Top Ten Tuesday #6 - Top Ten Books I Would Play Hooky With

It's Top 10 Tuesday, hosted at The Broke and the Bookish and this week's topic is

Top Ten Books I Would Play Hooky With

And here are my choices:

1- All the Peter Whimsey books by Dorothy Sayers, because I just love Lord Peter and with him comes Bunter - what adventures. 

2- Ulysses by James Joyce, because I would love to walk around Dublin for a day with Leopold Bloom again.

3- The Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer because I never went to boarding school and The Chalet School sounds like so much fun, not like school work at all.

4- The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett- Nick and Nora Charles, what a great couple to hang around with drinking martinis.

5- Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, because I would like to time travel back to England in the twenties.

6- The Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling because I am basically a realist, so Harry takes me away from that for a while.

7- Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie because if Harry is magical, this book is pure magical realism.

8- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak because I totally understand the whys of the need to read.

9- Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk because reading this book under my desk saved me from a horrible seventh grade year.

10- Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery because my mom gave it to me when I was very sick in fourth grade and I just love it.

All the Children Were Sent Away by Sheila Garrigue

It is the summer of 1940 and the war has finally found its way to the home front.  Air raids in London are becoming more and more frequent and bombs are beginning to fall.  And so when her uncle in Vancouver, BC writes to her parents in London and suggests that they send 9 year old daughter Sara Warren to Canada for the duration, they also think this would be a good idea.

They decide to place Sara in the care of Lady Drume, who is making the same trip for war related reasons. Sara has some reservations about meeting Lady Drume, but her mother reassures that it will be fine, though she does admit that Lady Drume is a funny old thing.

And that turns out to be an understatement.  Lady Drume immediately begins to order Sara around, before Mrs. Warren has even said good-bye, and once on the ship, she demands “implicit  obedience” from Sara.  This means staying in their cabin and never wandering around the ship alone.  But when the friendly old sailor Wilfrid Horace Mickleby a/k/a/ Sparky invites up on deck to watch the ship weigh anchor, Sara commits her first infraction of Lady Drume many rules. 

Luckily, Sara sits next to the friendly ship doctor for meals, who later takes her to the lounge to meet the other children being evacuated from the East End of London, including siblings Ernie and Maggie.  Sara immediately likes them, but Lady Drume tells her she may not hang out with “guttersnipes” while under her care.

Lady Drume is, to say the least, a dictatorial snob.  Not only does Lady Drume avoid all the other people on the ship except the Captain, she refuses to attend the lifeboat drills should the ship be attacked and decides that she doesn’t need to wear her life jacket even though it is mandatory.  

When the ship is attacked and sustains damage, it is "guttersnipe" Ernie who leads Lady Drume and Sara to safety.  Sara hopes that now maybe things will change.    

Yet, nothing really changes.  The day after the attack, Sara is told to fetch a book for Lady Drume, and she decides to bring an apple to the doctor on her way.  Sara gets delayed helping out in sick bay, and once again, finds herself in trouble.  Lady Drume had focused on Sara’s hair from the beginning.  Sara had been desperately trying to grow her fine limp hair so she could wear braids like all the other girls she knew.  In a rage over forgetting her book,  Lady Drume commits the unthinkable, Sara doesn’t think she will ever be able to forgive her.  But Lady Drume isn’t done with Sara yet and there is still so much traveling time left.

Sheila Garrigue was evacuated to Canada at 7 years old, and it is clear much of her shipboard experience in the U-boat infested Atlantic Ocean during the war made its way into this novel.  This was a somewhat unique adventure since overseas evacuations didn’t last long when ships, like the one here, were hit by torpedoes and sunk, killing some of the evacuees.  

This novel is not really wonderful, though.  The characters fall a little short of being authentic, and often feel very stereotypical.  Lady Drume’s refusal to acknowledge the war and its dangers seemed odd given that she was going to Canada to organize a war relief drive and than back to England because “my country needs me.”  Sara, for all she didn’t like Lady Drume, continued to inadvertently get into trouble and then allowed herself to become a timid victim.  Neither character ever seems to learn how to operate in the situation in which she finds herself.    

Oh, and as for the end of the story - let’s just say not very likely!

This book is recommended for readers age 10 and up.

This book was purchased for my personal library.

For more information on the Overseas Evacuation of Children, see visit The Second World War Experience Centre 

All the Children Were Sent Away

Sheila Garrigue

Scholastic

1976

170 Pages

Greater than Angels by Carol Matas

Though the story is fiction, this novel is based on a true story of the French village that hid the many Jewish children from the Nazis and helped to save their lives. 

When the Nazis rounded up Anna Hirsch, 15, her mother, her Aunt Mina and her elderly Oma (Grandma) one night in October 1940, they feared they would be sent from their home in Mannheim, Germany to Dachau. But, instead, they were put on a train to Gurs in Vichy, France and put in a refugee camp there. 

Conditions at the camp were deplorable. No bathrooms, sleeping on straw, always cold and hungry, sadly, it doesn’t take long for Oma to succumb to it all. But, at least, Anna’s friend Klara was there, too. 

Almost a year after arriving at Gurs, Anna and Klara are given the opportunity to live in a children’s home run by the Swiss Red Cross in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon along with Klara’s brother Rudi and others, their mothers do not hesitate a moment about sending them, even though they know they will probably never see each other again. 

At Le Chambon, the refugees are allowed to attend school and live a relatively normal life. They are even allowed to send and receive letter from family at Gurs and Anna even gets permission to return there to see her mother at one point. But as the war continues and things start to go badly for the Nazis, word comes to Le Chambon that the camp residents have all been deported east. 

Eventually, conditions in Le Chambon become dangerous for the Jewish children. Anna and Klara find themselves on the run from the Gestapo who are looking for them, but they always manage to find a place to hid with the French residents, but they know that they can’t continue to run and a permanent solutions needs to be found or they will be arrested. 

Anna and Klara are fictional characters, but they could have been any one of the over 3,000-3,500 Jews who were hidden and saved by local French residents of Le Chambon under the guidance of André Trocmé, a Huguenot pastor and pacifist. 

Matas has written an interesting, realistic novel based on true events. Greater than Angles is a short, but powerful novel, at times filled with nail-biting tension  Yet, it is an extraordinary novel about courageous people - both the French who also risked possible death for sheltering the young Jews from increasing the danger of the Nazis and the young Jews themselves, whose will to survive is admirable, even in the face of unspeakable conditions and loss.  

On a personal note, I particularly liked the many references to Berthold Brecht's The Threepennny Opera - an old favorite.

This book is recommended for readers age 12 and up.

This book was purchased for my personal library.

If you would like to read more about the Jewish children who survived in Le Chambon-sur-Chambon, please visit The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to read their excellent article.

Some of the actual young survivors of Le Chambon

Greater than Angels 

Carol Matas

Aladdin/Simon & Schuster

1998

177 Pages

OOPS!

I seem to have hit the Remove Formatting button by mistake and so if you see Greater than Angels in Goodle Reader and click on it you won't find the post here.  That is because it is somewhere in cyberspace and will return as soon as I can do it.  Thanks for patience and if you know why I can't undo Remove Formatting (Blogger won't let me) I would appreciate your suggestions.