Last week I presented the Skipping Stones Honor Awards list for outstanding multicultural, international, and environmental books for children and teens. One of the books on that list, the essay collection That Mad Game, edited by J.L. Powers and published by Cinco Puntos Press, contained the reflections of writers who had grown up in the shadow of war. Since the publication of That Mad Game, two books for readers at the older elementary and middle school levels—Maryann Macdonald’s novel in verse Odette’s Secrets, and Icy Smith’s picture book Three Years and Eight Months, illustrated by Jennifer Kindert—portray the experiences of children living under occupation during the Second World War. Both of these books are based on true stories.
Odette’s Secrets is based on the memoir of Odette Meyers, a Jewish girl from Paris who hid with her mother in the French countryside from age eight to eleven. Macdonald read Meyers’s autobiography in French and worked with Meyers’s son, Daniel, to turn it into a beautifully written and powerful story for young readers in the United States. Odette is not yet six years old when her father enlists in the French Army following Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. A year later, Hitler invades France, and Odette’s father becomes a prisoner of war. In the two years that follow, the girl, her mother, and the kindly landlord’s family endure material deprivation and the loss of their freedoms. Although Odette’s parents are not religious, they are Jews, so when soldiers come looking for them, they hide, first in the landlord’s closet and then in a rural village. There, Odette and, some months later, her mother, learn to live like country folk—without the luxuries of their Paris life but also with enough food and, as a result of a courageous act by the village mayor, with a modicum of safety. Odette becomes so accustomed to the rhythms and tasks of country life that return to the city comes as an unwelcome shock, one compounded by the absence of old friends who did not survive.
Macdonald does a fine job of presenting the story from a child’s point of view, and as an adult reader I found most fascinating what she leaves unsaid—that Odette’s parents are leftists. After her father is captured, her mother becomes part of the Resistance, and her underground network plays a major role in her and Odette’s survival. In this story, those who acquiescence to oppression do not survive, while resistance (especially as part of a community) significantly raises the odds of both survival and victory. The village mayor, for instance, is a member of the Resistance, which leads to his courageous defense of the mother and child. In general, I’ve found a lack of children’s books published originally in the United States that present protagonists as part of a larger community in a conflict or struggle—the emphasis seems to be on the protagonist’s individual conflict only. Odette’s Secrets successfully does show a protagonist within a community, but in an age appropriate (and politically neutral) way, and in a way that presents her personal desires, conflicts, actions, and maturation within that larger context.
Although published in 2013, Three Years and Eight Months earned a place on the Skipping Stones Honor Award list for books published the previous year. (Publishers can submit advanced reading copies for consideration in an earlier year, and for a small press title like Three Years and Eight Months, it offers an opportunity for pre-release buzz.) This is a well-deserved prize for a story about a little-known episode in the Second World War, and one based on the experience of author Icy Smith’s father and grandmother. Choi is ten years old when Japanese forces invade the British colony where his family lives in December 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Immediately, the Japanese take away the women, including Choi’s mother, to work as slaves in military installations and elsewhere. (Many of the women are sexually abused in that situation, but Smith refers to that fate only indirectly, by mentioning toward the end of the story that, “Many feel shame for socializing with Japanese soldiers and end up becoming Buddhist nuns.” Smith’s grandmother was one of them.) Left behind to live with his uncle, Choi and his best friend, Taylor, volunteer to work at a Japanese military base in order to have enough to eat, and ultimately, to help Choi’s uncle and Taylor’s father in their work for a resistance organization. When Choi and Taylor steal medical supplies from the base, they do not know that those supplies help to rescue shot-down Allied airmen and escaped prisoners of war.
Narrated in prose from Choi’s first person point of view, Three Years and Eight Months shares with Odette’s Secrets the perspective of a child living under occupation who finds in resistance a key to survival. Through words and pictures, the book portrays a close friendship between two boys who help each other through a difficult time. Realistic, evocative watercolor illustrations are a distinguishing feature of East-West Discovery Press’s picture books for older readers, and this one is no exception. Illustrator Kindert, of Thai heritage, captures the characters’ expressions and shows their maturation from age ten to fifteen, as well as their increasing emaciation and the raggedness of their clothing as the war drags on. Following the text is an informative afterword with black-and-white photos of Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation.