My Wartime Summers - Softcover

Cutler, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374454639 ISBN 13: 9780374454630

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 1997

Synopsis

Ellen Parker grows up during four memorable and bittersweet summers.

"This funny, sensitive novel is about an American child's experience at home during World War II, the adventure and urgency, and also the sorrow and anticlimax...Each episode on the home front is beautifully structured."-Starred/Booklist

About this title

About the Author:

Jane Cutler has published seventeen children's books. Darcy and Gran Don't Like Babies is a Reading Rainbow selection. The Cello of Mr. O has been adapted for the stage by artists in Tokyo and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was honored with the Zena Sutherland Award from the Laboratory Schools at the University of Chicago. Jane lives in San Francisco.

From Booklist:

Gr. 5-7. Like Avi's "Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?" (1992) and James Stevenson's Don't You Know There's a War On? (1992), this funny, sensitive novel is about an American child's experience at home during World War II, the adventure and urgency, and also the sorrow and anticlimax. Ellen Parker, 11, can't wait for her beloved uncle Bob to join the army. She knows he'll be a hero and get medals. She and her friends in her Midwest neighborhood play war games all the time, blending fact and fiction into glorious victory over evil. But when her uncle is sent to fight in France, his letters lose their playfulness. He sounds grim and then bone weary, and by the time he returns home in 1945, he's a distant stranger. Each episode on the home front is beautifully structured, building to its own climax, yet part of a unified story. The characters, including Ellen's parents and her uncle, are drawn with fine restraint. In one of the best chapters, tomboy Ellen just can't make out why her girlfriends are suddenly flirting with boys ("I was never quite sure what anyone was saying"). She knows that her new friend Lisa is a Holocaust refugee, but what really worries Ellen is that Lisa has breasts and Ellen doesn't. At the end, Ellen's calm confidence as she starts high school seems patched on; it's her scrappy, confused narrative voice that we've come to trust. Kids will recognize the compelling truth that even during a world-shattering war Ellen has intense selfish concerns that make her mad and hurt her feelings. Hazel Rochman

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0374454639
• ISBN 13: 9780374454630
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176