Stones in Water by Donna Jo Napoli

I picked up this book in a library book sale because it was about another one of those little known events that occurred during World War II: the snatching of Italian boys by Nazis and used as forced labor.  And also because the setting, at least in the beginning, was in Venice, Italy in the early 1940s, an unusual setting for most MG or YA novels.  The story centers on the friendship between 12 year old Roberto, a Catholic, and Samuele, a Jew.  It begins with the lure of seeing an American western film at the local movie theater proving to be too great for young Roberto to pass up.  Before long, however, not only is Roberto sneaking off to see the movie, but he is joined by his older brother Sergio, and friends Memo and Samuele.

The movie hasn't even begun when German soldiers swoop into the theater and round up all the boys.  Before they know what is happening, they are sorted by age so that Sergio and Roberto are separated from each other.  The boys are then put on trains heading north.  All through Italy, the trains picks up more and more boys.  Gradually, the trains head east to the Ukraine.  The whole operation appears to be such a perfectly planned operation.  A Western movie would and did draw only boys from the area, and no girls.  Non of the boys in any of the groups speak the same dialect, so there is little communication among them.  Soon, though, the boys realize the danger for Samuele, who is circumcised, so they change his name to Enzo and Roberto gives him his St. Christoper medal to wear.

Eventually, Roberto and Enzo end up in a labor camp, where all the boys are forced to build an airstrip for supply planes to land.  The work is hard and there is little food, and as winter comes the boys must find whatever rags they can use to try to keep from freezing, usually striping what they can off dead bodies - dead soldiers and prisoners alike were fair game.  At night, Enzo entertains Roberto with stories, most from the Old Testament, to keep his morale up.  The friends continue to support each other, so when another boy discovers that Enzo is Jewish and demands he give him most of his food ration, Robert shares his ration with his friend.

Throughout their captivity, Roberto worries about his parents and about getting home, but there seems to be no end in sight for the boys.  And to make matters worse, Enzo begins to weaken from the lack of food.  And to top it all off, with winter's snows, survival becomes more and more difficult for the boys.

Will they ever see home again?

This was the kind of coming of age story that really makes you realize what the concept 'coming of age' really means.  As you read Roberto's story, you can watch as he is transformed from a boy who had romanticized war to a thinking, feeling young man who realizes and appreciates the horrors of war without ever having been on a battlefield.  Yet, right from the beginning, Roberto and Samuele witness shocking Nazi brutality whenever boys tried to run away or when they fainted while working.  These were sobering lessons, and both boys heeded them in order to stay alive.

Stones in Water is a fast read, and for the most part it was excellent.  Some readers seem to feel that the end of the book didn't have a satisfactory conclusion, but I liked it.  Hinting at a sequel, I felt that Roberto has more in store for him than just going home.  And indeed, a sequel was written, Fire in the Hills, continuing Roberto's story.

One thing did bother me about Stones in Water.  It is based on reality, but I was sorry there was no Author's Note at the back of my copy to more fully explain the basis of the story, just an easy-to-miss brief mention in the acknowledgements.  It seems that Napoli has a friend, Guido Fullin, who was taken by the Nazis as a boy, just like Roberto was and Stones in Water is loosely based on him.  She did her own research but said no more about it.  I would have liked a list of further reading, if one can be done, about Italian boys being taken and used as forced labor despite Germany and Italy being aligned with each other during the war.  When I googled this topic, I didn't find much more than an interview with Donna Jo Napoli in which she reiterated what she wrote in her acknowledgements.  The interview may be found at Examiner.com

Despite this, Stones in Water is a very worthwhile story for readers young and old.

This book is recommended for readers age 10+
This book was purchased for my personal library.

The Girl is Trouble by Kathryn Miller Haines

Back in March, I introduced you to Iris Anderson, 15 year old girl sleuth living on the Lower East Side in NYC.  In that first novel, we learned that her mother had inexplicably committed suicide.  Her death brought changes in live of Iris and her dad, a vet who lost his leg in Pearl Harbor.

The Girl is Trouble opens just a few weeks after The Girl is Murder ended.  The first anniversary of Pearl Harbor is approaching, Iris is still attending PS 110, and hanging around with and confiding in her best friend Pearl.  The Rainbows, the school badies, are still mad at Iris for events that occurred in the first novel, including Benny, Iris's crush. In other words, Iris's life is status qua at the moment.

But then, all that changes.  First, Iris is asked to investigate a series of anti-Semitic notes being left in the lockers of the students who belong to the Jewish Student Federation.  Then, she finds a strange man outside her house after school one day who wants her to tell her private detective Pop that Stefan says hello.  And Pop is definitely upset when she gives him the message.  Lastly, when Pop accidentally leaves his safe open, Iris goes snooping and finds two sets of photographs.  The first set are random, candid pictures of her taken from a distance, the second set are of her mother in the hotel room at the White Swan on East 86th Street where she supposedly committed suicide - only the photos don't look like a suicide, they like more like a murder.

Suddenly, Iris has a lot on her plate, but first and foremost she needs to finds out what happened to her mother.  But Pearl refuses to go to the Upper East Side, a German American neighbor at the time, because  she tells Iris Jews are no longer welcomed.  Iris determines to go alone, but as she is sneaking out of school, she runs into Benny, who offers to go with her.

In the hotel room at the now abandoned White Swan, they are confronted not only with her mothers blood splatter on the walls and mattress, but by a man holding a gun.  Turns out, he is the estranged husband of the woman, Anna Mueller, who found Iris's mom.

And so, off they go to the biergarten (beer garden) where Anna Mueller now works.  She confirms that she found the murdered Ingrid Anderson, and called the police and was handsomely paid to keep her mouth shut and say it was a suicide.  Turns out, Anna was well paid, she now owns the biergarten.

Meantime, at school, more students in the in the Jewish Student Federation have received anti-Semitic notes and they are getting really annoyed at Iris for not really doing anything to find the person or persons responsible.

This is an awful lot of responsibility for one 15year old girl to shoulder, but Iris feels determined to find her mother's killer, no matter what.

OK, that is as far as I can go without giving away too much, after all, this is a mystery.  And it is a good one.  I thought the The Girl is Murder was also good, but it is a introductory first novel in a series, so they tend to be focused on familiarizing the reader with the recurring characters, the general setting, so the mystery may not be so interesting.  For that reason, I did find The Girl is Trouble to be more intensely focused on the mystery.

Kathryn Miller Haines has once again written a realistic historical fiction mystery, full of the kind of detail that a reader can sink their teeth in and though Benny teasingly calls Iris Nancy Drew, this book is not nearly as tame as a Nancy Drew mystery (don't get me wrong, I still love Nancy Drew books).  And she has filled in the personalities of characters like Benny, Pearl and Pop more, making this second novel feel even more realistic. Maybe Haines has even given Pop a new romantic interest.

1939 German American Bund march on East 86th Street NYC

As you can see from the photo on the right, Yorkville, my current stomping ground, was indeed a hotbed of Nazi support, but it was also a hotbed of anti-Nazi sentiment.  The German American Bund, seen marching here and which is a the heart of this story, did exist, but was outlawed after the US entered the war in December 1941.  Naturally, the Bund continued underground, as Haines shows in this novel.  But, it should be noted that besides Germans, there were also lots of Irish and Italian in Yorkville at the time.  Yorkville isn't very German anymore, but there are still traces of its Germanic residents, mostly shops and churches.



The Girl is Trouble will be released in July 3, 2012 and if you like a good YA mystery, this is a book for you.

This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was obtained as an ARC

If you want to read an except of The Girl is Trouble, be sure to visit the website of Kathryn Miller Haines.

This is book 1 of my Cozy Mystery Reading Challenge hosted by Debbie's Book Bag!!
This book is book 5 of my Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by Historical Tapestry

Blogoversary Giveaway Winner

First, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their good wishes on my 2nd Blogoversary.  When I go back over some of my posts, I am always surprised at how my blog has changed and yet remained true to its original purpose.

Second, The Children's War is a branded blog focusing on a specific area of children's and YA literature and ephemera having to do with World War II and its impact on the lives of young people.  But I read other books all the time and so I am setting up a companion blog where I can talk about those books, including all those great reads I picked up at BEA this year.  I will announce the new blog, which I am calling Randomly Reading, as soon as it it online, which I hope will be in the beginning of July.

Third, the winner of my 2nd Blogoversary is Jess from The Secret DMS Files of Fairday Morrow
Congratulations, Jess and I will be in touch shortly.

Thanks again to everyone for their support and I am looking forward to another good year at The Children's War and hope you are too.

Top Ten Tuesday #9: Summertime and the readin' is easy...

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

This week's top ten topic is a Summer TBR choice between books you are dying to read now or anticipated new releases.  I have chosen a mix of both:

1. Princess Elizabeth's Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal - this is the second book in a series that takes place in London during WW 2.  I have read and loved the first book, Mr. Churchill's Secretary, and was very excited to receive this second book at BEA this year and I got to meet Susan Elia MacNeal, who is really nice. 

2. Becoming Clementine by Jennifer Niven - this is the third book in a series about Velva Jean.  The first two were Velva Jean Learns to Drive and Velva Jean Learns to Fly.  Another WW 2, Velva Jean volunteers to fly agents to Normandy, France after the successful D-Day invasion, but she is more interested in finding her brother who is MIA.

3. The FitzOsbornes at War by Michelle Cooper - this is also the third book in a series about the FitzOsborne family.  The first two novels were A Brief History of Montmaray and The FitzOsbornes in Exile.  Written in journal form by teen Sophie FitzOsborne, she chronicles life in London during WW 2, while waiting for news of her MIA brother.

4. Wonder by E.J. Palacio - I sometimes think I am the only one who hasn't read this yet, but this summer I will be catching up with a few missed books and this is one of them.

5. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - ditto what I said about Wonder.

6. Drift: the unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow - I want to read this out of curiosity and because I don't like that this country has become so militarized.

7. Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr - I got this at BEA and can't wait to read it this summer.  Another very nice author.

8. All Fall Down by Sally Nichols - a YA story that takes place during the Black Plague in England that I want to read after reading the review over at We Sat Down.

9. Prodigy by Marie Lu - I read Legend last year after getting a copy at BEA 201111 and this year I got the sequel.  And yes, another very nice author.

10. Adaptation by Malinda LO - I've read Ash and Huntress and am curious to read this because ti is supposed to be very different from these two novels.  I got a copy at BEA and, yet again, a very nice author.

What are you looking forward to reading this summer?

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

While listening to Lois Lowry's talk at the Children's Book and Author Breakfast at this year's BEA, I realized that I have read Number the Stars in a long time, so naturally I had never reviewed it her at The Children's War, either.  So, I promptly re-read it as soon as BEA was over.

Number the Stars begins in September 1943 in Copenhagen Denmark.  The Nazis have been occupying the country for three years, but having armed soldiers on every corner is still disconcerting for the peace-loving Danes.  Yet, up until now, the soldiers have left the Danish people basically alone, including the Danish Jews.  But when two German soldiers stop ten year old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend and neighbor Ellen Rosen on the was home from school one day, it is clear that things are about to change.

The first real indication of change comes when the girls are sent to a neighborhood shop owned by Jews to buy a replacement coat button and discover the school is closed.  Later, they learn that the Nazis are forcibly closing down all the Jewish owned businesses.

The next day, Ellen's mother, looking very concerned and worried comes over to speak to Mrs. Johansen; it seems the Nazis are starting to search for Jews and it is decided to leave Ellen with the Johansen's, to try to pass her off as Annemarie's sister while the Rosens go into hiding.  And, indeed, the Nazis do come and search and question why Ellen has dark hair and Annemarie and her little sister Kristi are so blond.  Luckily, Mr. Johansen has an answer for them and they finally leave.

The next day, Annemarie, Ellen and Kristi travel with Mrs. Johansen to her brother Henrik's house in Gillelje, a small fishing village.  He and Mrs. Johansen grew up there and know the area very well.  That night, a hearse arrives with a casket  which is set up in the living room for mourners to pay their respects, according to custom.  The children are told that their Great Aunt Birte has passed away, but Annemarie figures out that the casket is empty, there has never even been a Great Aunt Birte in her family.

What's really going on, then?  Annemarie finds out when she is asked to undertake a dangerous job for her mother.

Without giving particulars away and spoiling this novel for anyone who may not have already read it, this is a story about the Danish Resistance.  Resistance and Partisan stories are some of my favorites, because I like to think there will always be people who refuse to accept tyranny (and I like to think I would be one of them.)  And of course, we have all heard of how the Danes saved so many Jewish lives by hiding and sailing them to Sweden in their fishing boats.  But, even knowing that, it is the details of how things were done that makes Number the Stars such a good book.

Almost 8,000 Jewish people were saved by the Danish Resistance, undertaken at risk.  It was a nationwide effort and the Danes were the only occupied country to actively resist the Nazi deportation of their Jewish friends, neighbors and even strangers.

Lois Lowry has captured the secrecy, the tension, the fear and the courage that surrounded the whole rescue operation in Number the Stars, as well as the level of cruel disregard Nazis held for the people in the countries they occupied.  And, as always, Lowry has managed to tell this relatively short story in the same straightforward, well-done style that she is known for.   And, not surprisingly, Lowry won the Newbery Medal in 1990 for Number the Stars.


If you haven't already read this award winning novel of hope and courage, now might be a good time.  After all, Number the Stars is a favorite on summer reading lists.

This book is recommended for readers age 10-14
This book was purchased for my personal library

Source: The Jewish Virtual Library
This is the kind of fishing boat used to smuggle out 10-12 Jews per trip

Source: A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
This map shows the the places where escape began in Denmark
Gillelje is located in northern Denmark

A study guide for Number the Stars can be found here

This is book 5 of my European Reading Challenge hosted by Rose City Reader
This is book 4 of my Historical Fiction Challenge hosted by Historical Tapestry