Starred Review ALA Booklist (Fri Sep 01 00:00:00 CDT 2000)

Starred Review Like Hahn's Stepping on the Cracks (1991), this is a powerful story of World War II at home, told by a young teenager who comes to question both friends and enemies and finds the dark inside himself. Robert is excited by the hometown military maneuvers and threatening submarines near his grandparents' New England village, where he's living while his dad's away fighting the Nazis. But the battle inside his family is scarier than the military exercises. Why is Robert's father never mentioned? What's the secret of why he left as a teenager and never came back? And why does Robert's friend and cousin, Eliot, cower before their raging grandfather? Shy, artistic Eliot has dangerous secrets, too: he's helping a German painter, Abel Hoffman, who lives in a shack near the beach. Is Abel a Nazi spy, as the angry mob in the village believes? To Robert's lasting shame, he helps them track the fugitive, then he hears about the Nazi mobs that attacked degenerative writers and artists like Abel and burned their work. Is the U.S. any different? Lisle weaves together the thrilling war action and the spy mystery with the battles in Robert's family and Robert's personal struggle with anger, jealousy, guilt, and betrayal. There's nothing reverential about the portrait of the gifted crackpot artist; in fact, all the characters are drawn with subtlety and depth (except, perhaps, the demonized Grandpa). Like Abel's expressionist art, Lisle's story shows and tells what's behind the appearances of things, the hidden feelings and memories, terrors and passions . . . everyone knows are there but cannot speak about.

Horn Book (Sun Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 2001)

A brilliantly conceived, multi-layered novel explores the tensions within a family against a backdrop of the wider conflict of World War II. His father in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Robert and his mother and sister move to Rhode Island to be near his paternal grandparents, from whom his father has been estranged for years. Lisle develops an unforgettable cast of characters placed against a fully realized setting.

Kirkus Reviews

Two stunning tragedies are at the center of this story of the WWII homefront. Lisle deftly uses the first two chapters to introduce characters and setting. The first begins with the slow progress of mighty naval guns into a Rhode Island village in 1942. Watching are 13-year-old cousins Robert and Elliot, and Abel Hoffman, an artist who has fled Nazi Germany. The second begins with a family dinner where Grandfather controls his family through barely contained rage. There is a ghost at the table and in Robert's life—his emotionally elusive father who is flying for the Royal Air Force, the mere mention of whom exacts savage reaction from Grandfather. Surrounding the two tragedies, which are never far from the surface, is a finely woven web of secrets, suspicions, prejudice, and fear. Lisle brings the anti-German sentiment that swept the East Coast into sharp relief through Hoffman, who discovers he is reliving the nightmare of his life in Germany. When the villagers, convinced he is a Nazi spy, set fire to his home and work, Hoffman walks into the flames of his own paintings. Characters are interestingly developed, especially the artistic Elliot, who uses his drawing to catch and contain images of fear so they lose their power over him. Elliot, who never directly opposes his grandfather, disappears into self-imposed isolation within his family. The second tragedy is jarring for all its earlier foreshadowing. Fittingly, it is revealed through Elliot's drawing in which Robert's defiant father is shot in the leg by his own father. The conclusion leaves Robert wondering how he can bear to live in a family that serves itself daily doses of denial and pretense, and learning "the art of keeping cool" from his enigmatic cousin. Briskly plotted, emotionally complex, brutal in incident yet delicately nuanced in the telling, a fine historical fiction. (Fiction. 10-14)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">PW said, "This wrenching WWII novel traces the relationship between two 13-year-old American boys and a German-born Expressionist painter reputed to be a spy. The intimate first-person narrative brings universal themes of prejudice and loss to a personal level." Ages 10-14. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May)

School Library Journal

Gr 5-7-Despite a misleading title (the word "cool" does not conjure up the 1940s), this is a well-drawn story that is part coming-of-age, part mystery. Robert and his mother have come to live with his grandparents on the Rhode Island coast in 1942, soon after his father has gone off to fight in the war. The coastal residents are getting ready for war and a German painter, living like a hermit on the outskirts of town, has raised suspicions of being a spy. To complicate matters, Robert's cousin Elliott, also an artist, is at odds with their grandfather, an imposing patriarch prone to anger. As the summer unfolds, the tension mounts. Robert and his mother wait anxiously for word from the front; Elliott grows more unhappy at home as he befriends the painter; the town turns against the outsider with tragic consequences; and Robert finally learns why his father has been estranged from his family. The focus is clearly on the men of the household, and cursory treatment is given to the women's feelings and thoughts. Although women in such situations are indeed often overshadowed by their husbands or fathers, the emotional depth of this story is undercut by their portrayals. Still this is a heartfelt story about family dynamics and the harmful power of prejudice and hatred.- Cyrisse Jaffee, formerly at Newton Public Schools, MA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.