Looking At the Moon - Softcover

Pearson, Kit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140348522 ISBN 13: 9780140348521

Publisher: Puffin, 1993

Synopsis

Norah, an English "war guest" living with the wealthy Ogilvie family in Toronto, can hardly wait for August. She'll spend it at the Ogilvie's lavish cottage in Muskoka—a whole month of freedom, swimming, adventures with her "cousins"...

But this isn't an ordinary summer. It's 1943, and the war is still going on. Sometimes Norah can't even remember what her parents look like—she hasn't seen them in three years. And she has turned thirteen, which means life seems to be getting more complicated.

Then a distant Ogilvie cousin, Andrew, arrives. He is nineteen, handsome, intelligent, and Norah thinks she may be falling in love for the first time. But Andrew has his own problems: he doesn't want to fight in the war, and yet he knows it's what his family and friends expect of him.

What the two of them learn from each other makes for a gentle, moving story, the second book in a trilogy that began with the award-winning The Sky Is Falling.
 

About this title

About the Author

Kit Pearson worked as a librarian for many years before publishing her first novel, The Daring Game (1986). She went on to write the linked novels The Sky Is Falling (1989), Looking at the Moon (1991), and The Lights Go On Again (1993), published in 1999 as The Guests of War trilogy, and Awake and Dreaming (1996), which won the Governor General’s Award. Pearson lives in Victoria, close to Ross Bay Cemetery, one of the settings in Awake and Dreaming .

From Kirkus Reviews

The second in a trilogy (The Sky Is Falling, 1990)--about two English children sent to live in Canada during WW II--takes Norah (now 13) and little brother Gavin for a summer at the large lakeside establishment of the Drummond family, whose several generations come there also to join Norah's hostess, wealthy old Mrs. Ogilvie. The family's lifestyle (plus Pearson's depiction of it) is leisurely--boating, games, etc. Of the nine cousins in the youngest generation, the one of greatest interest to Norah is Andrew, 19, a would-be actor whose family is pushing him into engineering school or the army (as an officer, of course; class is taken for granted). Norah develops a fervent crush on Andrew, a kind boy who (after he notices) preserves his friendly demeanor with admirable tact; he even confides his horror of killing to Norah alone, so that his later decision to join up comes as a shock to her (cf. Hahn's Stepping on the Cracks, 1991, which probes much deeper into this issue). Pearson writes with restraint--the adults never do find out about the party the kids throw when they spend a night away; unmarried Aunt Mary decides not to wed the nice man she's been meeting secretly all summer--yet the undramatic outcomes are realistic; meanwhile, Norah continues to grow and adapt, and others are lightly but credibly sketched. A period piece, at its best in evoking those strangely peaceful days. (Fiction. 10-14) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Puffin
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140348522
• ISBN 13: 9780140348521
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224