Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)

When Noah goes to the mailbox and finds a letter addressed to Bird, even though there’s no return address, he knows who it’s from. Only two people in the world still call him by his real name, Bird—his mother who vanished three years ago and his only friend, Sadie, who’s also disappeared. The handwriting on the envelope is his mother’s and so is the drawing that he finds inside--a single piece of paper covered with cats, an illustration from a story his mother used to tell him when she tucked him into bed at night.

After his mother’s departure, Bird’s father has demanded that he tell anyone who asks that she’s not a part of his life anymore. All traces of her have been destroyed and Bird’s memories of her are shadowed and incomplete. It’s Sadie who reawakens them by showing him an article she’s torn from a newspaper. His mother is Margaret Miu, a famous poet. The title of her poem, Our Missing Hearts, has become a battle cry for rebels and Miu is regarded as the leader of the rebellion.

PACT is what the rebels are fighting against—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. This is an integral part of America, installed after The Crisis that almost wiped out the country’s economy, a disaster for which China carries the blame. Chinese Americans are suddenly under suspicion, Bird’s mother most of all through the power of her words.

Suddenly Bird sees those words everywhere, on scraps of paper, on posters tacked up by invisible hands, in gigantic white letters painted in front of an installation of crocheted red yarn from which dolls are suspended. 

PACT, Sadie tells him before she runs away, is why she’s in a foster home. She was taken from her parents because they were part of the rebellion—and, she says, she’s only one of many children who were forcibly stripped from their families. She and the others are “the missing hearts.”

As Bird searches for a book that might hold the story that he dimly remembers, he goes to the library where a friendly librarian helps him in his quest—and remembers both Sadie and his mother. She even knows his true name and the poem that has made his mother infamous. She’s part of an underground railroad that does its best to find the missing children and reunite them with their parents. 

Suddenly Bird becomes consumed by the thought of his own quest--to find his mother and bring her home. Armed with a mysterious address that he finds by chance and the postmark on the letter he was sent, he goes off alone on a bus from Boston to New York City.

Celeste Ng has recreated the turmoil, paranoia, and inhumanity of our present century in a novel that examines this with the soft and magical touch of a fairy tale. Bird’s journey is guided by the stories his mother read to him from books by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. From them he’s learned to trust in the guidance of strangers and to be undaunted by what appears to be matters of wild coincidence. The Duchess, the reappearance of Sadie, the bleak circumstances that govern his mother’s life are all part and parcel of the web of folktales that have informed his life.

Adult readers may find this magical construction more difficult to accept. In a world where children have been separated from their parents and may never find their way home, where Asian Hate is so prevalent that it’s featured as the cover story in magazines, and where China has become the scapegoat for many in America, one that’s responsible for everything from covid to rampant inflation, this gentle version of our reality may be offensive and infuriating.

But Ng has constructed a setting where cruelty can be combated with persistence and hope. Beneath her contemporary fairy tale setting is a call for individual action, buttressed by a sense of individual responsibility, conveyed by characters who could be real, who could be us.~Janet Brown

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell (Doubleday)

I was shocked and appalled at my utter lack of knowledge on the history of the modern Middle East. The area has been a hotbed of controversy and conflict since ancient times. However the Middle East as we know it today was created after the end of World War I. 

Mary Doria Russell has created a novel in which a young school teacher comes into an inheritance, travels to Egypt, and meets and interacts with a number of historical figures, including Winston Churchill before he became Prime Minister, T.S. Lawrence, more commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia, and Gertrude Bell. Bob Hope makes a guest appearance as well. 

To be honest, I was familiar with Winston Churchill, only after he became Prime Minister. I had thought Lawrence of Arabia was a Hollywood creation, and I had no idea who Gertrude Bell was. But thanks to Mary Doria Russell’s meticulous research, I now know that before Churchill became Prime Minister, he was the Secretary of State for the Colonies and oversaw British foreign policy in the Middle East; that T.E. Lawrence was an actual person; and it was Gertrude Bell who was notable for helping to create the Kingdom of Iraq. 

Dreamers of the Day is narrated in the first person by Agnes Shanklin, an unmarried school teacher living in the Midwest and the eldest of three children. The time is 1918 when the “Great War and the Great Influenza fell on our placid world almost without warning.” Agnes’s family is not immune to the plague and she loses seven of her relatives, including her sister and brother-in-law, Lillian and Douglas, their two young sons, her Uncle John, her mother, and her brother Ernest. 

Lillian, Agnes’s sister, has married a professor at a college they both attended and he is offered a post to teach at the American Mission School in Jebail in Syria (which is today known as Byblos in the country of Lebanon). There she meets and becomes friends with T.S. Lawrence. In 1919 Agnes’s sister calls her and tells Agnes that she and her husband are taking her to a talk given by Sir Lawrence. It’s after this that she and her family contract the deadly virus. Agnes is the only one to survive.

After settling the affairs of three separate estates, Agnes finds herself “with plenty of money and no family of my own to support” so she books passage and takes the trip of a lifetime. She makes reservations to stay at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo.

The year is 1921 and the Semiramis Hotel has been chosen as the site for the Cairo Peace Conference, a secret meeting held by British officials to partition the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire that would become the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.

Into this world comes a single, middle-aged lady who finds herself in the company of celebrities and dignitaries alike. Agnes also finds romance, albeit with a married man who is a German Jew. She surmises that he is a spy because she is taken in by his charm and chivalry.

Russell’s story is as entertaining as it is educational. It teaches us the rich history of the Middle East but it also sheds light on the arrogance and condescension against natives by the core of the British bureaucracy. Russell has one of her characters state, “They believe that freedom is an object to be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.” 

The rebuttal by Agnes Shanklin is priceless as she replies, “They must surely know what freedom isn’t. It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation,” a major point for a lesson in American history. 

Unfortunately, the Middle East is still a land full of conflict. The Palestinians have yet to be given their own nation, the Kurds are still nationless as well. It may be another millennia before anybody sees any real changes in the Middle East. We can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

On Java Road by Lawrence Osborne (Penguin Random House UK)

Adrian Gyle hovers perilously on the edge of the old acronym, FILTH, Failed in London, Try Hong Kong, but in his case this is reversed. Although he’s lived and worked in Hong Kong since The Handover, he’s still known only as “a writer of something or other,” a self-described “excellent nonentity.” What has kept him afloat in his adopted city--and what’s kept him from returning to London as a failure-- is a bit of luck, a friendship from his university days with the son of a Hong Kong billionaire, a frivolous but loyal comrade. 

Jimmy Tang sees himself as a kind of Pygmalion, buying his old college chum the suits that will distinguish him from other journalist hacks, taking him to Hong Kong’s best restaurants, inviting him to parties where Gyle meets “useful friends.” But Hong Kong has changed over the past decades. “The disturbances”  have erupted and the divisions they have caused are jagged ones. Students, police, and Triad thugs battle it out on the streets while families like Jimmy’s, “servants of stability,” stay aloof, worrying that the revolutionaries will “spoil their paradise.”

Gyle is emotionally detached from the battles that he witnesses until he meets Jimmy’s latest girl. Rebecca To is beautiful, articulate, 23, and a rebel. From a family so closely linked to Jimmy’s own that the two of them are committing “social incest,” she comes to dinner bearing the scent of tear gas. 

Gyle, after three meetings, becomes infatuated with his friend’s girl and when she mysteriously disappears soon after she and Jimmy have broken up, he is haunted by Rebecca. Is she one of the many bodies who have shown up in Victoria Harbor? Could Jimmy’s visit to a morgue, one where a drowned girl has recently arrived, be a sign that this dead girl might be Rebecca? And who has sent an anonymous email to Gyle with details of Rebecca’s final days and of the way she died, an email that implies that Jimmy was complicit in her death?

The real mystery of On Java Road is the book itself. Is it a thriller or a tale of the supernatural? Is it an adventure steeped in class differences and political change or just a lengthy description of Hong Kong that’s been cloaked with an overlay of fiction? 

There’s a fine line between detachment and complete disinterest that Lawrence Osborne’s novel flirts with. He gives more details about the sartorial and gustatorial habits of Hong Kong’s plutocrats than he does about the revolution that’s tearing the city apart. When conversations between his characters threaten to illuminate local politics, he removes all quotation marks and gives a brief and superficial summary of reported speech. The book is rich with Gyle’s interior thoughts and observations while every other character exists in a shadow land, amorphous and allowed only brief moments of animation.

Much praised for his sense of place, Osborne excels in his evocative portrait of Hong Kong, a city that he clearly loves. His observations of its neighborhoods are vivid enough to make readers want to get on the next plane and see this beauty for themselves. Unfortunately it also gives rise to the feeling that On Java Road is a collection of lovely pieces written for a glossy travel magazine that have been grafted onto a slender novella. Although Osborne has often been compared to Graham Greene, this work is more reminiscent of the kind of short story written by W. Somerset Maugham. Appropriately enough for the season, this is a ghost story--and the ghost of a novel that never really comes to life.~Janet Brown

Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan (Groundwood Books)

Rukhsana Khan is a Canadian children’s book writer who was born in Lahore, Pakistan and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. She writes mostly about Muslim culture and the Middle East.

Wanting Mor is set in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Jameela is a young girl and a devout Muslim whose mother is her inspiration. She was born with a cleft lip and because of that she didn't have many friends. Her father is originally from Kabul and is currently helping to build a new road for the rural village that they live in. 

The story opens with the death of Jameela’s Mor, the Pushto word for mother. Without her mother’s guidance, Jameela doesn’t know what will become of her life. There is no school in her war-torn village so she can not read or write. Jameela often avoided her Baba, the Pushto word for father. He had an unpredictable temper and didn’t like the way he would look at her lip, “like somehow it was my fault I was born this way.”

A few days later as Jameela is doing the laundry, her father returns from work and says to pack up everything and tells her they’re leaving. He tells her he sold all their belongings and said they were moving to Kabul. Jameela couldn’t protest and the only thing she was able to take with her was a bundle of her wet clothes and a comb. 

She does manage to say goodbye to her Mor at her gravesite. Jameela who has never left her village feels that she can hear her mother saying, “Remember the man who asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) for advice. What did the Prophet (peace be upon him) tell him?”  “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.”

Her father takes them to a house where Jameela is immediately put to work. She can see her father getting money from the man who owns the house. The man’s wife first tells her to clean the pots in the kitchen. They need scrubbing but Jameela who has never lived in the city has never seen soap. The dishes are done by using ash. Jameela doesn’t know what soap is, she can’t believe that you can get water inside the house and don’t need a hauling bucket. 

Jameela tries her best to please the woman of the house. She quickly learns how to use a gas stove, how to use water and soap to scrub pots. What she can’t get used to is seeing her father act the way he does - drinking alcohol, getting drunk, dancing with another man’s woman at a party. She has to keep reminding herself - “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.” It becomes her mantra of sorts. 

Things do not work out at the house but Jameela’s father already had a new plan in motion. He drags Jameela to another house and tells her, “Jameela, this will be your new mother”. Jameela’s new stepmother is even more demanding than the previous woman. The mother treats her like a slave and doesn’t like her. Finally, one day, Jameela’s father takes her to a busy market with him. He tells her he needs to do something, then abandons her there. 

What becomes of Jameela is tragic and yet inspiring. A kind-hearted man takes her to an orphanage where she at least has a temporary home, makes friends and learns how to read and write. She is a testament to her faith and convictions. Her Mor always remains in her heart. Mor was her mentor, her role model, her pillar of strength. Now with no mother, and no father too, Jameela must face the world on her own. Her mother always told her, “If you can’t be beautiful you should at least be good.” She takes this advice to heart and endures a countless number of hardships before an orphanage takes her in. 

The author, Rukhsana Khan says that although the story is fiction it was based on an actual incident. She read a report on children in crisis that was issued by Afghanistan’s department of orphanages. In the report, it mentioned the story of a girl named Sameela. Her mother had died during the war, her father remarried and the new stepmother didn’t want her, so the father took her to the marketplace and left her there. 

It’s so sad to hear of reports like this and at times I found it irritating how governments refer to civilian deaths as “collateral damage” but the statistics doesn’t include the hundreds, if not thousands, of children, who are left as orphans. And the actions of the father in this story is as repulsive as the true life report. When will world leaders learn, “in war, there are no winners” or as the United Nations tweeted on their official Twitter account, “There are no winners in war, but countless lives will be torn apart.” ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghost Town by Kevin Chen, translated by Darryl Sterk (Europa Editions)

Keith Chen has escaped from Yongjing, the rural village in Taiwan where he grew up, a place so small that the only privacy the inhabitants know is found in the secrets they carry. Secrets, Keith learns early in life, breed violence. “We never held you,” his dead father tells him in a ghostly confession that no human can hear, “We hit you instead.” 

In Berlin, secrets haunt the lives of Keith and T, the man who wants to marry him but is constrained to a domestic partnership by German law. Unable to answer the questions his lover asks in the one language they share, Keith writes down what T wants to know, in stories that T is unable to read. T’s own secret emerges in acts of sadism that culminate in his death. His murderer goes to prison and when Keith is finally released, he returns to his village and the four sisters who survived their childhoods. 

Ghosts are commonplace entities in Yongjing: the woman who haunts a deserted bamboo grove, Keith’s father whose death fails to remove him from his family, the most beautiful of Keith’s sisters whose lush body encloses an aridity that drives her to suicide.  But when he returns, Keith discovers his own ghostliness, moving through a changed landscape, where odors provide his only orientation and his sisters prove to be his only anchors.

Kevin Chen tells this story through the voices of the dead and the living, each one unfolding a narrative that’s brutal, steeped in sensory details that rarely make their way into fiction, relieved by surprising bursts of humor and quick flashes of beauty. Every voice rings out with its own individual timbre, carrying its own particular burden of memories. Slowly secrets come into the open, bit by bit, until the facts appear in stark truth, losing their power once they’ve been told.

Ghost Town is a shocking novel in the way it toys with its readers’ emotions, while maintaining a stoic and matter-of-fact unveiling of its details. A child striptease artist becomes an unlikely savior; a girl is punished by witnessing her grandmother kill her dog and serve it as the family dinner; a nouveau riche mansion is described in satirical detail, right down to the waterbed that’s filled with “melted snow from the Swiss alps.” In prison Keith takes comfort in knowing that he’s “small fry compared to some of the guys” with whom he’s acting in a version of Hamlet. “The guy who is playing Ophelia in drag killed three people. Another of the Hamlets killed five. I only killed one.” Then there are the sisters, each one of them a small masterpiece of sibling rivalry, coming together “like bacon in a skillet…I know where your scars are, you know where I hurt…The sisters kept turning on the heat.” And it’s doubtful that any reader will fail to be surprised by what emerges at the story’s end.

Everyone in Yongjing, ghosts and survivors, exist outside of the world at large, “in a time zone all of their own.” The dead, observing the present, often seem more alive and aware than the living, who carry the weight of the past. As Chen asks in his Afterword, “Do you become a ghost only after you die? Or can you qualify as a ghost while you are still alive?” It’s a question that taunts and haunts, one that will keep this novel alive long after its last page has been turned.~Janet Brown

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang, translated by Julia Lovell (Anchor Books)

Eileen Chang, also known as Zhang Ailing, was born in Shanghai, China in 1920. She was studying literature at Hong Kong University, but returned to her hometown in 1941 during the Japanese Occupation. Her stories are about life in 1940’s Shanghai and were highly acclaimed by the book buying public, although she was panned by critics for not focusing more on the political climate of the times, especially after the communist takeover. She first moved to Hong Kong then found her way to the United States. 

Lust, Caution was first published in 1979 and unlike most of her stories, focuses on characters involved in the radical and patriotic movement of the times. It is set in Shanghai and Hong during the second Sino-Chinese War. Radical Cantonese students plot to assassinate Mr. Yee, the head of intelligence in Wang Ching-wei’s government, a real historical figure who formed a collaborationist government with the Japanese occupying forces in Nanking between the years of 1940 and 1944. 

At first the students planned to assassinate Mr. Yee in Hong Kong but their plans were thwarted as Mr. Yee and his family unexpectedly returned to the mainland. The students were going to abandon their plans due to a lack of funds and no chance of getting close to Mr. Yee again. This is also when the female conspirators denounce Chia-chih as being a whore for having sexual relations with Liang Jun-shung, also a student conspirator who trained Chia-chih in the art of seduction. However, Mr. Wu, a member of the underground resistance against Wang Chie-wei’s government, offers to sponsor the student’s plans in Shanghai. 

Wang Chia-chih is a student actress who is assigned the role of Mai Tai-tai, he wife of a fictional Hong Kong businessman named Mr. Mai who was made bankrupt after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong. It is Chia-chih's task to seduce Mr Yee and lead him to his final demise. After the loss of Mr. Mai’s business, Mai Tai-tai decides to do a bit of smuggling herself and takes some luxury items to sell in Shanghai where she is soon introduced to Mr. Yee’s wife. 

Chia-chih’s becomes a member of Yee Taitai’s mahjong circle and has a secret affair with Mr. Yee. On the day of Mr Yee’s assassination attempt, Chia-chih has a change of heart and tells Mr. Yee to run.

The story was also made into a feature length film in 2007 and was directed by Ang Lee, who also writes an Afterword in the book. The character of Chia-chih is believed to be based on the real-life spy named Zheng Pingru, who gathered intelligence on the Japanese Occupying forces and attempted to assassinate Ding Mocun, the security chief of the Wang Ching-wei government. 

As Lust, Caution is a novella, the story is fast-paced and some of the supporting characters are not fully developed. As soon as they are introduced, they are never heard from again. Also lacking is the backstory to Chia-chih’s affair with Liang Jun-shung.The act of betrayal to the student conspirators leaves the reader baffled. Has she fallen in love with Mr. Yee? Does she believe that his feelings for her are genuine as well?

In the end, it is still up to the reader to decide why Chia-chih did what she did as Mr Yee escapes and the students, including Chia-chih, are captured and are all put to death. After the execution, Mr Yee realizes that he did love Chia-chih but did what he thought he must do to prevent any rumors spreading, and thus it can be said of their romance, “In war, there are no winners, but all are losers”. ~Ernie Hoyt

After the Last Border by Jessica Goudeau (Viking)

The United States is peopled by the descendants of immigrants. Despite this, U.S. immigration policy has historically been ungenerous. Emma Lazurus’s poem The New Colossus, written in 1883, has always been the ideal, not the reality. “The huddled masses yearning to be free” have received a grudging welcome through “the golden door.” Jessica Goudeau vividly reveals this in After the Last Border, through the stories of two immigrant women and a concise history of America’s stance toward immigration.

A year before Lazurus wrote her classic poem, the US slammed the door on Chinese immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A battle between restrictionists and liberalizers of immigration has been raging ever since, with racism fueling the restrictionist side. Like the president who would come long after their first appearance, restrictionists wanted “literate, upper-class, white, Northern Europeans without disabilities.” Even those criteria failed to save the 937 Jewish asylum seekers fleeing Hitler on the MS St. Louis in 1939. Refused entry into the United States, the passengers were sent back  to Europe where 254 of them died in concentration camps.

Scarred by that act of cruelty and fueled by the Cold War, U.S. immigration softened to allow entry to refugees from Communism. First the Hungarians and Cubans arrived, and after the signing of the Immigration Act of 1965 came Southeast Asians. But the policy ignored Haitian refugees and Nigerians who fled the Biafran war. Racism still lurked under the surface, limiting immigration as best as it could.

Goudeau shows the mercurial nature of U.S. immigration policy through the stories of very different women whose experiences diverge because of the rapid changes that can come to that policy without warning.

Mu Naw is the lucky one. She, her husband, and their two children arrive as refugees in Austin, Texas in 2007. Karen villagers who had fled Myanmar for the safety of a refugee camp in Thailand, Mu Naw and her family had never known security and they welcome the idea of resettlement. Young and rootless, the young parents find their new life is one where they can make a living, as sparse as entry-level positions will allow, and where their children can be educated. Mu Naw had lived in refugee camps since she was five. In spite of the challenges and hardships that come her way in Texas, she proves to be more adaptable than her husband and eventually more successful. When they buy a house in 2016, her husband admits this achievement is because of her efforts.

Hasna is less fortunate. In her midyears, she too comes to Austin, nine years after Mu Naw, with her teenage daughter and a husband who has been so badly injured that he’ll never work again. War in Syria disrupted her life as an affluent, educated, proud matriarch, sending her across the border into Jordan. When she’s advised to apply for refugee status, she turns it down--until she learns that family resettlement is a key provision in immigration policy. Her husband’s objections to this plan are silenced by an explosion that tears his body apart and her adult children are scattered across different countries. The thought that they could all be together again, along with the promise of medical care for her husband, propels Hasna into the bureaucratic thicket of paperwork and interview that will take them away from war to a family home in another country. She arrives four months before Donald Trump is elected president. Two months later, his ban against Muslim immigrants and his dismantling of the family resettlement policy turns Hasna’s dreams into a waking nightmare.

Jessica Goudeau’s skillful and intimate journalism gives the narratives of Mu Naw and Hasna the pace and detail of a novel, interspersing them with chapters that illuminate the policies that have shaped these women’s lives. What could easily have been a polemic is instead a quiet and heart wrenching history that is too little known by most of us and should be read by all.~Janet Brown

A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master (Albert Whitman & Co.)

Irfan Master lives in London but has set A Beautiful Life in Gujarat, India where his family comes from. It is his debut novel. The story centers around the Partition of India. To understand the story, we need to understand the Partition of India. This was the division of British India into independent nations - Hindu dominated India and muslim dominated Pakistan and East Pakistan which later became Bangladesh. Once the British left and the two nations were left on their own, it spawned one of the greatest migrations of people in history. There was also an outbreak of sectarian violence between Hindus and Sikhs on one side fighting against Muslims on the other and an estimated 200,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed. 

The year is 1947, approximately three months before Partition. Thirteen-year old Bilal is a young Muslim boy taking care of his father who is lying on his deathbed. Bilal’s mother had already passed away and his older brother was hardly ever at home. Bilal senses that there is something wrong with the neighborhood he grew up in. He can’t put his finger on it yet but he feels the tension in the air and recognises the changes in the market. Two stallholders who used to be partners, one making daal while the other made rice. Now, they each have their own stalls selling the same item.

Bilal opens the story by making a confession as an adult. “Everybody lies. We all do it. Sometimes we lie because it makes us feel better and sometimes we lie because it makes others feel better.” 

What was the lie that Bilal told? It was something he felt he should not let his Bapuji (father) know as he felt the truth would send his bapuji to his death early. Bapuji is not only Bilal’s father, but he is also his guide and mentor. He was a well-educated man and was well aware of his condition. He told his son that he would need to make arrangements to live with his sister in Jaipur. 

Although Bilal agrees with what his bapuji says, he has no intention of moving or leaving his bapuji to die alone. Bapuji is always asking Bilal for news. Especially on the issue of the government reaching a decision to divide the country. He tells his son, “the soul of India can’t be decided by a few men gathered around a map clucking like chickens about who deserves the largest pile of feed.”

The only thing Bilal wants is for his father to die in peace. So, with the help of his friends Chota, Manjeet, and Saleem, they scheme to keep the news of India’s impending Partition a secret. They also devise ways to intercept potential visitors to Bapuji, even his own doctor. But how long can they keep this a secret? And will Bapuji die knowing his India is still one and the same?

I found the story to be very reminiscent of the 2003 German film [Good-bye Lenin!] which has a similar plot. In the movie, the story follows a family in East Germany. The mother is a dedicated socialist but falls into a coma in October of 1989 before the November Revolution. She awakes eight months later in June of 1990 not knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall or that East Germany has reunited with West Germany to become the nation of Germany. Her son tries to protect her from the truth as he believes it may kill her. 

A Beautiful Life is about filial duty and having the courage to face inevitable changes…in life, in the environment where you live. It is about trying to understand the hatred between people just because they follow a different religion. The death and violence caused by the Partition of India may have been avoided if the British who were leaving didn’t just arbitrarily assign a line dividing the nation in two. A Beautiful Life is a beautiful and poignant story and although written for a younger generation, the ending will stick with you long after you have finished reading the book. ~Ernie Hoyt