Dream Within A Dream

I spent a lot of afternoons watching movies with my best friend growing up, and one of our favorite screen stars was Audrey Hepburn. I can't count the number of times we saw Roman Holiday , Charade , and Breakfast at Tiffany's ? Audrey Hepburn was the quintessential Holly Golightly. So when I saw that a book about her life during World War II had been written, I was really excited to read it, especially when I realized I knew nothing about Audrey Hepburn's off-screen life. Robert Matzen has written a biography that focuses mainly on Audrey Hepburn life during the Second World War when she was living under Nazi occupation in Holland, with her Dutch family on her mother's side. Hepburn was only 11 years old when the Nazis invaded, and it would understandably have a deep impact on her. In fact, all through her adult life, Audrey was haunted by what much of what she witnessed and experienced during WWII. Audrey was born in 1929 to a Dutch mother, Ella, Baroness van Heemstra...

I thought I would repost my Memorial Day post from 2012 because I fear that I can feel the winds of war as blowing once again, however faintly, and I thought a reminder of what Memorial Day is all about might help us remember why we have this three-day weekend at the end of May. Memorial Day, or Decoration Day, as it used to be called, originated in 1868, when General John A. Logan declared May 30th the day for remembrance, a day when the graves of those soldiers who had fallen in battle during the Civil War were decorated with flags, flowers and wreaths as a way of honoring and remembering them.  Logan picked May 30th because it was a day on which no battles had occurred in the Civil War.  The tradition continued, and, in the 1880s, Decoration Day became Memorial Day. In 1968, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed and in 1971, Memorial Day would always be celebrated on the last Monday in May, giving us the three-day weekend we now have. FYI:   I was reading one of my...

After reading Emma Carroll's WWII book Letters from the Lighthouse  a while back, I knew I was going to have to go back for more. So I was pretty happy when I read about When We Were Warriors and ordered it from Book Depository immediately. This time, instead of a complete novel, Carroll has written three short stories, all set in the summer of 1942, all along the Devon coast, and connected to each other by an interesting thread. Story number 1 is called "The Night Visitors" and the main protagonist is a boy named Stan. Living in Bristol, Stan and his sisters are on their way to get some fish and chips for dinner when a bomb hits and changes their lives. With their house destroyed, and their mum hurt rather badly, Stan, older sister June, and younger sister Maggie are evacuated to the Somerset hills, to a large old supposedly haunted house called Frost Hollow Hall, joining other kids who have already been there for a while. No sooner are they told about the three places o...

In this short novella, a 5½-year-old girl calls herself Captain Rosalie, thinking of herself as a soldier on a secret mission during WWI, spying on the enemy and preparing her plan of action. And she is sure that one day she will be awarded a medal for what she does. Living in a small French village, Rosalie is really too young for school, but the teacher, a wounded war veteran, lets her sit quietly drawing in the back of his classroom every day while her father is away fighting in the war and her mother works in the factory for the war effort. Rosalie is given a notebook and pencils with which to draw. But since it contains her plan of action, she never, never leaves the notebook where it can be found. At night, her mother reads letters from her father at the front, a father she has almost no memory of. Instead of writing about war, he writes about what they will do when the war is over, but Rosalie refuses to listen to her mother reading the letters.  Then one night, after Rosali...

The Good Son  is probably the most unusual book I've reviewed on this blog. It is a World War I story about one small soldier's experience and although it's a picture book for older readers, the recommended is age 14+. And it isn't exactly illustrated in the traditional sense - each page is photographed using customized painted miniature figures, more sophisticated versions of the kind toy solders so many kids played with, and all of them are set in detailed landscapes, creating powerfully effective tableaus. Written one hundred years after the end of WWI, the tale opens, in slightly blurred black and white photos, long after the war is over.  It was a war that was supposed to be over by the first Christmas, but instead went on for years, while people suffered and kept going into battle. "About one hundred years ago, the whole world went to war" The story shifts then to color photos of Pierre, a young French solder, sitting alone, locked in a barn. Pierre is f...