Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene

Over the summer (appropriately), I reread this favourite from my teenage years.  I couldn’t remember a lot about Summer of My German Soldier, apart from the kiss and the hiding place over the garage.  I had a vague feeling it was set in America, but wondered how it could possibly be that a Jewish girl hides a German prisoner of war in the US.

It turns out my vague feeling was correct.  It is in fact set in Arkansas during World War II, in a small backwater where the only Jews in town own the local department store.  Patty Bergen is the unloved eldest child of the family.  When POWs from the nearby camp are brought to the store to purchase hats for their field work, Patty forms a bond with Anton Reiker, a half-English, half-German POW who interprets for the others.  Later in the story, Anton escapes and Patty hides him in an abandoned loft above the garage.

That is an overview of the plot, but these scenes take up surprisingly few chapters.  There is so much more to this book.  Weaving through the plot are portraits of: a town steeped in prejudice; a family in which appearances (literal and figurative) are everything; and a character searching for her self-worth. 

I highly recommend this powerful story of friendship.  I loved it as a teenager and I love it still.

The Best Bit of Summer of My German Soldier: “The greater the value, the greater the pleasure in giving it.  The ring is yours, P.B.”  Then in the darkened silence, I heard him breathe deeply.  “Am I still your teacher?”  Without pausing for an answer he continued, “Then I want you to learn this, our last, lesson.  Even if you forget everything else I want you to always remember that you are a person of value, and you have a friend who loved you enough to give you his most valued possession.” – Bette Greene

The Accidental Princess by Jen Storer

I’m busy writing and rewriting, not much time to stop and blog, but I had to mention this gem of a chapter heading I came across while reading Jen Storer's The Accidental Princess.

The Accidental Princess is a wonderful modern take on old fashioned story-telling for middle-grade readers.  Boys, don’t be put off by the title, there’s plenty of gory bits and slime.

Best bit of The Accidental Princess – Chapter Sixteen: Wherein there is dancing and other horrors.

The Theory of Everything

When the kids start back at school, I have a not-strictly-adhered-to tradition of going to the cinema on my own for a little me-time.

And so it was today, after a much-needed haircut, I went with my $11 online ticket to see The Theory of Everything.

The story is based on the book Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen written by Stephen Hawking’s first wife Jane Wilde Hawking.  The two leads, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, are superb in this heartbreaking romance.  The story follows the couple’s meeting, romance, Hawking’s diagnosis with motor neurone disease, his subsequent physical decline, marriage, children, Hawking’s success as a brilliant theoretical physicist and the difficult decisions that Stephen avoided, but inevitably had to be made (ultimately by Jane).

I was moved to tears many times during the film and I was still quite emotional on the drive home.  I’m not sure why.  The film has a happy ending: Stephen, who was given two years to live from diagnosis, is now 72; both Jane and Stephen remarried but have remained good friends.  Perhaps it’s the fact that love couldn’t conquer all.  It didn’t matter though because, as Stephen says in the movie, ‘Where there is life, there is hope.’

The best bit of The Theory of Everything (spoiler alert): Stephen’s last computer generated words in the film when he and Jane are watching their children play in the grounds of Buckingham Palace: ‘Look what we made.’

Best Bits of 2014

These are my highlights of 2014.  They weren’t necessarily new this year; they were just new to me.

Best Book:  A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, Ill. by Jim Kay (see post earlier this year).

Best TV show: Outlander (Gorgeously shot on location in Scotland, it has everything I love in a story – history, time-slip, adventure, romance and the added bonus of Sam Heughen as Jamie Fraser.  Thank you Foxtel for switching channel numbers around in November so I could happily, inadvertently, stumble upon this.)

Best Movie: The Fault in Our Stars (This is one of those memorable movies that makes you laugh and cry at the same time.  Read what I thought of the book here.)

Best Song:  Unfortunately it was played to death on the radio, as good songs often are, but after complaining about a dearth of love songs, I have to pick Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran.

Best wishes to one and all for a great year in 2015.

Lyrical Lesson 2: Assonance with Pink Floyd

Assonance is the resemblance of sounds. 

Besides an awesome bass riff, brilliant guitar solo, and tongue-in-cheek rebellious lyrics, what makes Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall one of the most memorable rock songs of all time is its use of assonance.  You will notice in the example below that none of the words strictly rhyme (unlike the refrain: All in all you’re just another brick in the wall where ‘all’ and ‘wall’ are a perfect rhyme). 

Assonance is not the same as rhyming; rather it is the repetition of similar sounds within a sentence or piece of writing.  Pink Floyd use a long ‘e’ sound, a long ‘o’ sound and long ‘ah’ sound in repetition throughout the song as follows:

We don’t need no education (We need)

We don’t need no thought control (don’t no control)

No dark sarcasm in the classroom (dark sarcasm classroom [if you sang this line with an American accent, you’d find two lots of assonance with sarcasm and class])

Teachers, leave them kids alone (Teachers leave picks up the long ‘e’ sound and Alone picks up the long ‘o’ sound from the first two lines.

Assonance can be used to great effect in both poetry and prose.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

I’m in the middle of rewriting a manuscript and am trying to dedicate as much time as possible to it, but I must mention this fabulous book I read recently.

A Monster Calls was developed from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd who died from cancer before she was able to write the story.  It’s gorgeously illustrated by Jim Kay; he and Patrick Ness won the Greenaway and Carnegie Medals respectively for this book.

Conor lives with his mother who is ill.  His father has moved away to America (from the UK) and Conor does not get along with his grandmother.  One night Conor is visited by a monster, who returns repeatedly to tell him stories.  The stories don’t make sense to Conor, they seem unfair and anger him.  The monster says after the third story, Conor must tell his own story.

After the monster tells each story, Conor is ‘possessed’ by the monster with frightening consequences.  But in spite of the bad things Conor has done, he is not punished. 

When Conor finally tells his story, he accepts the unfair truth: his mother is going to die. 

Having lost my own mother to cancer when I was young, I related to this story in almost every detail (apart from a giant yew tree visiting in the middle of the night).  It’s a rare thing to find a wonderful book that feels like it’s your story there on the page.  I highly recommend this book to everyone, but particularly for anyone who’s lost someone to a terminal disease.

Best Bit of A Monster Calls:  It’s hard to choose:  the superb writing, the outstanding illustrations, or the truth-seeking monster that lives in us all.

Can’t wait to see the movie: Liam Neeson is signed on to play the monster.

Lyrical Lessons

I’ve decided to make an occasional departure from my usual ‘Best Bits’ posts, to share some light-hearted lyrical lessons.

Lyrical Lesson 1: Simile vs Metaphor

A simile is a comparison of one thing to another, often using the words as or like.

A metaphor is when a term is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable, in order to suggest a resemblance.  (Thanks to my poor, coverless, rendered-into-two-volumes Macquarie dictionary for that definition.  I asked for a new dictionary for Christmas but instead got Macquarie’s A-Z of People and Places, which tells me Simitis became Greek prime minister in 1996 and Meta is a river in Colombia.)

But back to Lyrical Lesson 1:

When Nellie Fertado tells us she’s like a bird and will only fly away, she’s singing in simile.  The Blues Brothers, however, tell us to shake our tail feathers implying we are actual birds with tail feathers to shake (metaphor).

Elton John compares Norma Jean (Marilyn Monroe) to a candle in the wind, something flickering and fragile, never destined to last (simile).  Katie Perry sings, Baby you’re a firework.  There is no comparison; Baby is that explosion in the sky (metaphor).

Jordin Sparks questions why love always feels like a battlefield (simile).  Well, Jordin, Pat Benetar had the metaphorical answer back in the eighties: 

Love is a battlefield.