Not only that, she finds out the closure’s not for the claimed repairs needed, but so Negroes can’t swim there. Glory can’t believe it… the Hanging Moss Community Pool is closing right before her July Fourth birthday.

The closing of her favorite swimming pool opens 11-year-old Gloriana Hemphill’s eyes to the ugliness of racism in a small Mississippi town in 1964. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.Ī deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards-not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events-but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service.

The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction ( Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction-a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.įive years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Two caveats: the realism may disturb younger readers and it's not clear why Phillip's father doesn't take him, and the horses, when he leaves the first time-or why he almost leaves the horses a second time, after Phillip has risked his life for them. Phillip succeeds both as a witness and as a character (he has a way with animals and is the kind of boy who can be trusted with a gun) the immediacy of his experience makes this an exciting historical sidebar. It's the 1906 earthquake and, through Phillip (who stays to care for the horses while his father takes the rest of the family to safety), the reader is there-for the heaving that knocks horses to the ground, for the collapse of his house, for the parade of fleeing, panic-stricken San Franciscans, for the fire, for the bombing intended to stop its spread.

He goes to check on the family's livery stable, and within minutes his world turns topsy-turvy. Phillip MacMillan, 12, wakes with an uneasy sense that something isn't right.

Marie by Kathleen V. Kudlinski