FING'S WAR

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)