Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash, an evacuation novel for adults

Title: Beyond That, the Sea
Author: Laura Spence-Ash
Narrator: Ell Potter
Publication: Macmillan Audio, 2023
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: 20th century London, Greater Boston, Maine

Description: When Millie and Reggie Thompson make the difficult decision to send their eleven-year-old daughter as an evacuee to America to escape the Blitz, they could not have guessed she would be gone for five long years.

Carrie's War by Nina Bawden – based on the author's WWII evacuation to Wales

Title: Carrie’s War
Author: Nina Bawden
Publication: J.B. Lippincott Company, hardcover, 1973
Genre: Children’s Historical Fiction
Setting: WWII Wales

US cover

Description: Like many other London children in 1939, Carrie and Nick Willow were evacuated from war-torn London for safety with a case each, gas masks slung over their shoulders, and their names on cards around their neck like labels.

A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus - another delightful evacuation novel

Title: A Place to Hang the Moon
Author: Kate Albus
Publication: Holiday House, hardcover, 2021
Genre: Juvenile historical fiction
Setting: World War II England

Description: William, Edmund and Anna Pearce will not miss their formidable grandmother but, without her, they realize they are now homeless orphans.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Life After Life to The Luckiest Girl

Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month it’s a wild card – the chain begins with the book that ended our July reading, which means that my starting book is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013).

Someone is Watching

My younger sister gets an email from the school library every time her six year old checks out a book.  This would have infuriated me as a child because I liked reading books adults often thought were too old for me.   I remember three specific incidents:  in third grade I was reading The Fellowship of the Ring, and although my mother had read The Hobbit to my middle sister and me I suspected she might think this book was too scary or over my head[1] so I kept it tucked in my desk drawer with a red felt pen I used to write down an occasional vocabulary word.  On Teacher’s Night, Mrs. Freilich[2] exposed my secret to my parents!  I think my mother was amused and my father reclaimed his pen (which were apparently banned at school, although no one had told me) but I certainly never trusted her again.

The next year my parents were duly waiting their turn behind a husband and wife they knew very slightly.  These people were complaining that someone in the class had given their daughter an extremely unsuitable book.   Somehow my mother guessed it was me and waited apprehensively to see what it had been. Then Miss Barnes said audibly, “Maybe Suzanne wasn’t quite ready for The Secret Garden but it is a lovely book she will enjoy some day.”   See, I was just helping her improve her mind!   Miss Barnes and I did not always see eye to eye but she read aloud often and introduced me to some wonderful books:  On to Oregon, The Black Stallion, and The Phantom Tollbooth (this latter became such a favorite I chose it to giveaway in World Book Night last year.

Later, in seventh grade, at a new school where the library contained little new fiction but was full of Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, and religious-themed books like Miracle at Carville, I discovered Anya Seton and became entranced by her masterpiece, Katherine.   I must not have been very good at concealment because, thinking the book was very racy based on the cover, I hid it under my pillow where my mother, innocently changing the sheets, found it.  I came into my room to find her curled up with John of Gaunt, and she happily told me she had read that book the year she finished high school when it was serialized by the Ladies Home Journal.   The only remonstrations I ever got from her regarding my choice of books was her desire that I would not race through an author too quickly, denying myself the pleasure of anticipating a delightful read. 

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[1] My mother would not have been totally wrong.  I had read Carolyn Haywood’s book, Primrose Day, the previous year, which features an English girl named Merry (and inspired my interest in evacuation stories).  As a result, I thought Tolkien’s hobbit Merry was a female hobbit.  There were plenty of male possessive pronouns but I airily dismissed those as typos and wondered about a possible romance between Merry and Pippin for some time.   I paused in my reading when Gandalf fell in the Mines of Moira and did not return to the Lord of the Rings until I turned 11 or 12.

[2] She already had a conflict of interest issue that had been unaddressed.  She had previously taught the other first grade section and one of her students, Laura Rabinowitz, who later attended Brown, was a flower girl at her wedding.  Fourteen months later, Mrs. Freilich began to teach third grade and Laura was in our class!  Favoritism resulted.