I recently did an interview about how I wrote One Step At A Time: A Vietnamese Child Finds her Way. Thank you, Erin Knight, for the GREAT questions.

Here’s the interview.

 

Cape Town

by Brenda Hammond

A beautifully written novel about a teen from a conservative Afrikaans family in pre-Mandela South Africa.

Renee convinces her parents into letting her leave their isolated rural community in order to study ballet in the big city — Cape Town.

When she arrives as a student at the University of Cape Town, Renee is initially confident in the Afrikaans’ God-given right to govern, and that giving votes to Blacks would be a disaster. Her existence up to this point has been so isolated that she’s never shared an activity with Black or Coloured (ie mixed race) individuals, unless they were servants.

On campus, the first person who befriends her is Dion, a Coloured dancer who is openly gay, and she quickly falls in love with Andy, who is not only English (considered the devil by her Afrikaans father) but is a human rights activist.

Add to the mix Renee’s brother Etienne, who is an undercover agent for the Afrikaans controlled police-state.

Hammond does a great job in showing the incremental change in Renee’s attitude to the people and politics around her, and as Renee changes, the stakes get higher, with riots and violence all around.

In her personal life, she’s playing a double game, keeping her relationship with Andy a secret from her parents and from her guardian aunt.

It all comes to a head in a page turning way.

Brenda Hammond’s writing is visual and sensual, which is oh so appropriate for a novel about ballet and about an exotic locale.

A great read.

Check it out here.

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is one of those mega-award-winning Canadian authors (with more than a dozen titles) who hasn’t crossed over our shared border (just yet!) with the same success. She’s best known for her historical novels for younger readers about what must be one of the most difficult subjects ever – children and war. Her latest, which debuted far north last fall, hits U.S. shelves next week (March already!). Airliftis Skrypuch’s first narrative nonfiction, the true story of Son Thi Anh Tuyet and her last days in her native Vietnam and her first days with her Canadian family.

Tuyet can’t remember life before she came to live in the Saigon orphanage with all the children, babies, and nuns. Her only memory of “outside” are occasional visits of a woman with a young boy, who may or may not have been her mother and brother. “‘After a while, they stopped coming.’”

On April 11, 1975, Tuyet is frantically packed into the back of a van with babies and toddlers strapped into makeshift boxes headed to the airport. She is one of 57 children on what will turn out to be the last Canadian airlift operation to save orphans from a war-torn Saigon on the verge of collapse. As an older child of 8 with a leg weakened by polio, Tuyet is convinced she’s been brought only to help care for the younger children; as long as she remains useful, perhaps she will not be sent back to the orphanage.

Her remarkable journey – filled with unfamiliar faces, words she cannot understand, a future that seems so uncertain – lands her with a family of her own. “‘You are my daughter,’” her new mother assures her even before she can understand the words, “‘Not my helper.’” “Grass … swing … play,” her new father teaches her. And “‘sister,’” her new siblings call her with comforting hugs and kisses.

Enhanced with documents and a surprising number of photographs, Airlift is a touching, multi-layered experience. The strength of Skrypuch’s storytelling shows strongest in the smallest details: Tuyet’s wonder at discovering that stars are real things in the sky, her knowing better than the adults that to quiet the screaming babies is to place them close together, her doubt about “dads … [who] didn’t seem very real [as] she had never actually seen one.”

In the ending “Author’s Note,” Skrypuch explains how her initially intended novel became Tuyet’s narrative: ” … I was going to piece together a story of one orphan based on the experiences of many. But as I recreated these experiences from my research, an interesting thing happened. In small flashes, Tuyet bagan to remember more. … When Last Airlift was complete, Tuyet was overwhelmed by the fact that it was, in fact, her own story that had been reclaimed.”

Terry Hong

BookDragon

Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program

http://bookdragon.si.edu/

http://www.facebook.com/sibookdragon

@SIBookDragon

Check it out here.

In Making Bombs for Hitler, a Ukrainian woman warns 8-year-old Lida in the cattle car transporting her to slavery in Germany, “Be useful or they will kill you.”

Lida’s story dramatizes the little-known story of slave raids made by Nazi forces in the Soviet Union during the war. Young people were rounded up and used for forced labour in appalling conditions. Many were worked or starved to death; some were used in medical experiments.

From the Bukovina region of Ukraine, Lida is all alone in the world. Her mother was murdered by Nazis as she tried to help Jews, her father was killed by the Soviets. Lida is ripped away from her younger sister, whose story is told in the earlier novel, Stolen Child.

Lida learns to lie to protect herself, to say she is much older than she looks. But, alongside shrewdness, she has other sources of strength. She remembers her mother’s teaching that “You can make beauty anywhere.” And so she takes pains to stitch her work badge, the one that marks her in the eyes of her masters as a subhuman from Ukraine. Her talent with a needle saves her on more than one occasion, but her survival instinct doesn’t blunt her conscience. In a brave attempt to shield a Jewish child, she gives up her one precious keepsake, an iron crucifix.

Making Bombs for Hitler is a sensitively written page turner that teaches lessons in courage, faith, ingenuity and hard work. Lida’s odyssey brings her to the edge of death and, after a protracted struggle, immigration to Canada. It is an important story, but one requiring much adult guidance, even for an older age group than the 9-to-12 bracket for which it is recommended.

What a fascinating and odd novel. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

Vivid characters — Aomame, the gifted assassin and Tengo the underachieving genius mathematician / writer. Mix in blank-faced and dyslexic Fuka Eri, the cult, the Little People. A meandering and mind-exploding story. Murakami’s language is deceptively simple. The reader falls into the story, not realizing what they’re in for. I ended up loading this novel onto my phone so I could read it in bits and snatches. I was continually caught off balance by the various twists and turns.

I loved all the little threads that intertwined throughout and how in the end they made perfect sense.

Hard really to explain this novel. I am sure there are people who would throw it against the wall only 50 pages in, but I was entranced.