Fing's War
Fing's War
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Publisher's Hardcover ©2018--
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Enchanted Lion
Annotation: The Boon family and their indefatigable gallows humor are back in Benny Lindelauf's follow-up to Nine Open Arms.
 
Reviews: 2
Catalog Number: #172709
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Publisher: Enchanted Lion
Copyright Date: 2018
Edition Date: 2019 Release Date: 06/11/19
Pages: 411 pages
ISBN: 1-592-70269-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-592-70269-5
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 2019011185
Dimensions: 23 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews

As if weathering adolescence weren't hard enough, war casts Fing into further maelstroms of terror and heartbreak in this sequel to Nine Open Arms (2014).As a narrator, Josephine "Fing" Boon makes a particularly sharp-tongued, angry, and naïve observer of events. It's hard to blame her for coming across as unlikable. The series of scourges she endures begins with having to leave school to take a job as hired companion to Liesl—a demanding, manipulative, and deeply traumatized child in the household of the Dutch town's wealthy Cigar Emperor and his German wife, called, in the region's Limburgish slang, the Pruusin. It continues with the departure of her first boyfriend, who returns a Nazi-sympathizing Blackshirt, and the unexpected arrival of what she deems her "Red Flood." It escalates through the German occupation, increasing hardships, a devastating family breakup, and the rescue of one of her two sisters from being bundled aboard a train with a group of Jewish deportees…including, shockingly, the Pruusin. As the absorbingly complex narrative progresses, Fing isn't the only character in the white-default cast apt to leave readers with conflicted sympathies. Coming almost as a relief, the emotional bombshells ultimately culminate in an air raid's physical one that leaves Fing and readers poised with no end in sight.Hard battles form this satisfying novel's throughline, some fought in the open but most won or lost in the heart. (cast list, glossaries) (Historical fiction. 12-15)

Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

As if weathering adolescence weren't hard enough, war casts Fing into further maelstroms of terror and heartbreak in this sequel to Nine Open Arms (2014).As a narrator, Josephine "Fing" Boon makes a particularly sharp-tongued, angry, and naïve observer of events. It's hard to blame her for coming across as unlikable. The series of scourges she endures begins with having to leave school to take a job as hired companion to Liesl—a demanding, manipulative, and deeply traumatized child in the household of the Dutch town's wealthy Cigar Emperor and his German wife, called, in the region's Limburgish slang, the Pruusin. It continues with the departure of her first boyfriend, who returns a Nazi-sympathizing Blackshirt, and the unexpected arrival of what she deems her "Red Flood." It escalates through the German occupation, increasing hardships, a devastating family breakup, and the rescue of one of her two sisters from being bundled aboard a train with a group of Jewish deportees…including, shockingly, the Pruusin. As the absorbingly complex narrative progresses, Fing isn't the only character in the white-default cast apt to leave readers with conflicted sympathies. Coming almost as a relief, the emotional bombshells ultimately culminate in an air raid's physical one that leaves Fing and readers poised with no end in sight.Hard battles form this satisfying novel's throughline, some fought in the open but most won or lost in the heart. (cast list, glossaries) (Historical fiction. 12-15)

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Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)
Word Count: 94,783
Reading Level: 4.6
Interest Level: 4-7
Accelerated Reader: reading level: 4.6 / points: 14.0 / quiz: 502253 / grade: Middle Grades
Reading Counts!: reading level:3.7 / points:22.0 / quiz:Q77207
Lexile: HL650L
Guided Reading Level: N

The Boon family and their indefatigable gallows humor are back in Benny Lindelaufs follow-up to <i>Nine Open Arms.</i><br>Poised to win a scholarship to the nearby teachers college, Fing has high hopes. Its 1938 and her poor family of nineone father, four brothers, three sisters, and a grandmotherhas finally managed to eke out a living in the tiny cigar factory abutting their dilapidated home. But smelling success, her dreamer of a father is determined to expand and Fings dreams fall apart when she instead has to go to work for the Cigar Emperor, taking care of his new, German wifes eccentric niece. The novels gripping language, enriched by Yiddish, German, and Dutch dialect, plunges the reader into the world of a large, colorful, motherless family as they navigate the changes World War II visits upon their little town on the border of the Netherlands and Germany. This stand-alone follow-up to <i> Nine Open Arms</i>, a 2015 Batchelder Honor book translated from Dutch, is a fantasy, a historical novel, and literary fiction all wrapped into one.


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