Our Castle by the Sea by Lucy Strange - an exciting novel set on England's southeast coast during WWII

Title: Our Castle by the Sea
Author/Narrator: Lucy Strange
Publication: Scholastic, audiobook/paperback, 2019
Genre: Juvenile Historical Fiction
Setting: WWII Britain

Description: Petra Smith and her family live on the southeast coast of England; her father is the lighthouse keeper and they have been very happy until war begins. Then Petra’s older sister Magda starts getting into fights, defending their German-born mother, and becomes secretive. When their mutti is taken away and interned as an enemy alien, Petra knows her mother is not a spy but she feels helpless and is scared of the changes war has brought to her family – not just her mother's departure but also rationing, the spooky old man living in a cottage on the cliff, bombers flying overhead, and the fear of a Nazi invasion. The only constant in her life is the long-ago legend that four young girls sang their fishermen fathers home from the treacherous sea, then as payment were turned into the mysterious standing stones on the clifftop.

My Impression: This was a captivating story, from the beginning when Pa tells his daughters the legend of the standing stones to the end where Petra yearns for good news after a year of tragedy. When WWII begins, Petra, who is only twelve, has no idea how brave she will need to be to cope with the challenges ahead. She does know that her volatile sister has been acting oddly and it was realistic that the sisters are at odds for much of the book, as Magda does have a dangerous secret and is extremely careless of her younger sister’s needs. At times, Petra is very observant, and at others, she seems slow at making deductions about what is going on around her (if I can coax my 12 year-old-niece to read this, she will instantly guess why Magda is distracted). Where the author excels is depicting the tension that consumes this coastal town near Dover as the war gets closer, including a scene in a bakery owned by an Italian couple where an old man hisses, “Jerry!” at Petra’s German-born mother (and the Italians are later interned as well). Strange creates very strong secondary characters such as Edie, who works at the bakery; Spooky Joe, the old man on the cliff; and Pinstripe, the detective investigating Mrs. Smith’s alleged traitorous activities.

The most breathtaking part of the book is the evacuation from Dunkirk, in the north of France, between May 26 May and June 4, 1940.  The British Admiralty appealed to owners of small boats to go to France to rescue the British, French, and Belgian troops that had been pushed back by the Germans. Over 800 vessels made the trip and more than 300,000 soldiers were rescued. Of course, I know about this famous part of WWII but Strange's narrative is dramatic and exciting.  Magda, who had yearned to join the WRENS but was not old enough, is determined to take her boat the 20 miles to France and sneaks out of the house while her sister is asleep. Petra waits all day, then all night on the clifftop, willing a safe return and calling on the legend of the standing stones to protect her family:

Then, without any warning, the idea was there in my head and I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to sing. Fear shivered through me as I turned towards the Daughters of Stone.

The fishermen’s daughters sang a song of love and loyalty and sacrifice to bring their fathers safely home. This was the moment I had always known about in my bones, ever since Pa first told me the legend. This was the moment in which I would finally become part of this ancient story. The sky wrapped around me, gray as fate, enveloping me, together with the stones and the cold-smoking sea. . . . I was aware of the stones all around me as I sang. I knew from the quickened pulsing of my heart that the ancient magic was not dusty and sleeping: it was alive, it was awake. I didn’t need to look at the stones to know they were listening to me, their granite glittering like frost in the dawn light.

Dunkirk; photo credit English Heritage

Of course, Petra and Magda are not the only young people we know who are distrusted because of their German heritage. Even when America was still neutral during the First World War, the sinking of the Lusitania and other neutral shipping created anti-German feeling. Our own Tib Muller, whose German-American family had settled in Wisconsin and Minnesota, explained to Betsy Ray that she was philosophical about it but that her brothers were stung by suspicions of their loyalty and Hobbie was thinking about going to Canada to enlist. In Britain, at least 30,000 enemy aliens were interned starting in 1915 (including Petra’s mutti), and more than 2,000 German-born or German-Americans were interned in the US after April 1917, when the US entered the war. According to the Library of Congress:

For German American culture, however, the new century was a time of severe setbacks--and a devastating blow from which it has never fully recovered.

The coming of World War I brought with it a backlash against German culture in the United States. When the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, anti-German sentiment rose across the nation, and German American institutions came under attack. Some discrimination was hateful, but cosmetic: The names of schools, foods, streets, and towns, were often changed, and music written by Wagner and Mendelssohn was removed from concert programs and even weddings. Physical attacks, though rare, were more violent: German American businesses and homes were vandalized, and German Americans accused of being "pro-German" were tarred and feathered, and, in at least one instance, lynched.

The most pervasive damage was done, however, to German language and education. German-language newspapers were either run out of business or chose to quietly close their doors. German-language books were burned, and Americans who spoke German were threatened with violence or boycotts. German-language classes, until then a common part of the public-school curriculum, were discontinued and, in many areas, outlawed entirely. None of these institutions ever fully recovered, and the centuries-old tradition of German language and literature in the United States was pushed to the margins of national life, and in many places effectively ended.

I remember being so shocked when Jo March marries a distinctly unglamorous German professor (let alone that it wasn’t Laurie) and my mother having to explain to me that in Alcott’s day, his German intellectualism would have been very alluring. I was unimpressed.

Those who love Flambards or The War That Saved My Life will also enjoy Our Castle By the Sea. There are a few bits that are predictable or hard to accept but the author’s skill carries the reader along – when I was listening to the audiobook, I didn’t want to get out of the car. I had read an earlier book by this author, The Secret of Nightingale Wood, which I liked well enough, but this was much more impressive and I gave it 5 stars. This is also my seventeenth book for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Source: Library