Customer Reviews

The Children's War

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In 1939, Ilse Blumenthal's mother scrapes enough money together to send her 13-year-old daughter to her brother in Morocco. In most books this would be the end of the story, but Ilse's life is not so simple. The small, shy girl has a Jewish father and a "pure" Aryan mother, and her father is not only Jewish, he's a communist who has rarely been around. In Morocco, her kind uncle becomes the father she has always wanted but this paradise cannot last. As the war develops, Ilse is sent to her father in Paris and so begins her journey to survive a in a world where the most solid ground can turn to quicksand at any minute.

In Hamburg, her mother finds work as a nanny for friends of her brother. She forms a bond with Nicolai, a boy her daughter's age. Through Ilse and Nicolai we see the world coming apart and two children forced into roles that a sane universe would never ask them to play. The result is a very suspenseful book where like Ilse and Nicolai, you never know what will happen next.

With our fabulous hindsight we often wonder why people-especially Jews-didn't get out of Germany while they could. "Children's War" brings home the tangle of loyalties, loves, hopefulness, and plain disbelief kept people waiting for things to get better. And then opportunities to leave were cut off even before the war began.

I understand from British reviews that this book may be the first of a trilogy. Great. I want to find out how Nicolai and Ilse, if they survive the war, survive the peace.

This book is all the more moving for its lack of sentimentality. While the big picture of the horrors of war and the nature of evil is terrifying, it is very much a story of two young people trying to work out the world around them.

Told in alternate chapters from the perspectives of a girl and boy who are at the outset twelve years old, it always leaves you wanting to know more. The characters are wonderfully likeable and the deceptively simple style adeptly captures their changing perspectives as they grow up. The novel is at moments life-affirmingly charming and romantic.

Impossible to put down, well-paced, and suspenseful. Not a word wasted. One of the most powerful books I have ever read.

In hindsight, war appears to have some sort of order. There is a coherent sequence of battles, a logic to strategies and a presumption that participants understand their roles in war's panorama. Monique Charlesworth reminds us of the terrifying chaos of war in her challenging and instructive novel, "The Children's War." As the title promises, her novel delves into the psychological horrors children experience as unwilling victims of war's impersonal evils. Because her protagonists are early adolescents at the onset of World War II, they simply cannot fathom the complex series of variables that have engulfed their parents and compelled these adults to decide courses of behaviors that will indelibly stain their children's lives. Charlesworth writes with dignity, strength and courage; her characters are suffused with an integrity that has been forged out of incomprehensible loss and stunning resolve.

Both Ilse and Nicolai, the two youths around whom the narrative of "The Children's War" pivots, are children in exile. Though Nicolai lives in a comfortable German home, he is emotionally removed from his amoral mother and devastated by his father's absence. His self-induced exile from family presages an even more serious existential alienation from the fascist mentality that has overtaken his country. Sensitive, introspective and doubtful, Nicolai contrasts starkly from the goose-stepping, depersonalized youth that the Nazi regime was in the process of creating.

Half-Jewish Ilse repeatedly is torn between her mother and father. The latter, an ideologically pure anti-facist, is aloof and often absent, yet it is with him that Ilse must survive. She would have rather chosen her mother, who in an act of self-sacrifice and love, expatriated her daughter and then, after Ilse was gone, sought to bring her back to Germany so that their fates would be intertwined. Ilse's resiliency is remarkable, all the more so given her innocence and her reluctant absorption into cultures alien to her identity. First in Africa and then in Vichy France, Ilse not only must come to grips with spiritual displacement, but she must survive. After survival comes a search for meaning, one she creates out of valiant acts of rebellion and resistance.

Ilse's mother navigates the war years without certainties, a living set of contradictory decisions for which she has had no ethical training, no prior set of experiences through which she could gain understanding. She gives up her daughter in order to save her. She bestows protection and loving care on another family's children while relinquishing her own daughter to an ordeal most adults are incapable of facing. She denies her identity, her past and even her love for her husband in order to live.

Chaos and confusion course through "The Children's War." Monique Charlesworth never stoops to bromides and tidy resolutions; instead, she compels her readers to confront the harrowing fear and grinding panic children face during the extreme pressures of war. Her characters encounter infidelity, corruption, moral capitulation, defiance, resistance and fading hopes on a daily basis. That they can survive is testimony to the deepest drives humans could have: the need to understand and to act.

This is a great novel that I strongly recommend. It's a coming-of-age story, but it's also a story of World War II. Charlesworth does an excellent job of bringing to life the years of the war from the point of view of two children who turn into teenagers and ultimately adults during the conflict. This is not the war of statesmen and soldiers. It's war as it affects regular kids and regular people--people with little knowledge or understanding of what their leaders are doing. As readers, we can easily feel the confusion, fear, uncertainty, and pain of the protagonists. Ilse, the half-Jewish girl, just wants to be with her mother; Nicolai, the German boy, has no interest in being a Nazi or fighting for the Fuhrer. But war will test them without regard for their hopes or their young age.

Charlesworth doesn't shy away from describing some of the horrors of the war. But there's nothing gratuitous here, and Charlesworth stays away from tearjerking scenes. If I have one complaint, it's that the initial setup of the book--the parallel stories of Ilse and Nicolai--is not continued throughout the book. Gradually, we read more and more about Ilse and less about Nicolai. This is really Ilse's story, and some readers will wish that the Nicolai character had been given the same depth as Ilse. By the end of the book, the Nicolai character becomes almost irrelevant. The book could stand on its own just as a story of Ilse. But this is a minor complaint. Overall, the novel is a great read.

In this novel, the author takes several fictional characters and navigates them through the WWII. In many ways, this is a slightly different view of the war as most books (at least that ones that I have read) about the Holocaust. It doesn't really give an overall perspective of how the war progressed in a distinct timeline. Instead, switching between two main character who have vastly different experiences, you only know what they know.

These two characters whose lives the book center around are both teenagers, a girl named Ilse and a boy name Nicolai. Ilse has a jewish father and an lutheran mother (I'm purposefully not saying a german mother and jewish father, as her father IS german, he's a german jew). She is sent away for safety, and spends the majority of the book in France in various situations.

Nicolai, on the other hand, is the son of a well-off German family. His father is (reluctantly) in the army, and his 1/2 brother is in the SS. He spends the entirety of the book in Hamburg, Germany. His connection to Ilse is through her mother, Lore, who works as his sister's nursemaid.

The other thing that I found different about this book is that the author chose to not focus on the jews and their religion. Ilse is 1/2 jewish, but hasn't been raised at all religiously and really knows very little about it. Many of her aquaintances are Jewish, but there is little discussion of the faith. There is less about the persecution of the jews, and more about the lives of everyone who found themselves involved with the war. Through their journeys, Ilse and Nicolai meet up with many different people in different situations. Obviously, they are fiction, but it really does give you a different perspective.

Beyond perspective, the book is well-written and rivetting. I found that I didn't immediately get into it, but once I did, I couldn't put it down. It's moving and very real without being corny and overdone. You really care about the characters, while seeing their flaws. Even though we know how the war turned out, you find yourself emotionally invested in these characters.

This is a splendid book, covering many facets of the Nazi rise to power, but told from the viewpoints of the children, both in Germany and France. Unique.

This book's beauty of language and imagery simply takes one's breath away. Its heroes are understated, its rights of passage unpretentious, its moments of insight so profound that they stop you dead in your tracks. At the end, its emotional impact is almost overwhelming. A book which conveys what it is to be human, this is a fully-formed work from a fully-formed writer. Ilse asks at the end, "Who'll tell the story of the children?" Monique Charlesworth has - and how.

Rarely have I had to abandon a book but within 28 pages I thought either this was either some sort of literally joke or I needed to read this book upside down. The killer blow came with the following turgid and ridiculous description of a meal time: "Nicholai made fortifications with his potatoes,forked waves into a gravy moat.Caraway seed men attacked and defended; the sausage battering ram won through.Madga had saved a portion of fruit compote for him. She ladled cream.He plunged a spoon through the white lake to the red current depths,then swirled the two into a Catherine wheel." Good grief. Dont bother-if you want to read a story of children in WW2 then there have got to be better options than this completely overcooked tripe