From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 21:06:23 -0500

Thanks to several participants in the CCBC-NET community, we've all had a chance to think about some of the details anchoring Lily's Crossing to its decade and the war that directly affected even child life throughout the U.S.A. during the first half of the 1940s.

Thanks to Dave, Carrie and Robin, we've read just three provocative interpretations of the title of Patricia Reilly Giff's novel Lily's Crossing.

Barbara Scotto previously indicated that Giff gets at the "essence of childhood at that time" and Lily's "personal boundaries," and she referred to the emotional truth of Lily's Crossing.

At the end of the novel, Giff herself comments about the nature of Lily's Crossing compared to her earlier published fiction. After detailing some of her own WW2 memories, we read: "I've written about friendship before, but in a lighthearted way, laughing as I've worked through the lives of Casey, Tracy & Company and the Polk Street Kids. But this time, I wanted to explore what happens to people as they forge a relationship in a more serious way. I wanted to tell my readers that even though the times are different now, people have always worried about the same things ... loss and separation, the future, and sometimes war. I want readers to know that love and friendship make a difference."

Please comment, if you wish, on Giff's statement or anything else about Lily's Crossing. There's much more that can be said about this fine novel, and you're most welcome to say it.

I'm also going to invite everyone to lift up some of the other memorable fiction for children and young adults - newly published or tried and true - set during World War Two. (After that, we'll briefly touch on exemplary historical fiction from any period.)

To begin, I'll mention Nim and the War Effort written by Milly Lee and illustrated by Yangsook Choi (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997). This highly visual short story appears at first to be a picture book but it has a longer text and more challenging content than most preschoolers find interesting. Even the title's reference to the "war effort" knits the story to a WW2 phrase very familiar to children then, girls and boys alike who pulled their wagons along the sidewalks and roads to collect newspapers or scrap metal "for the war effort." Lee's text digs into one dimension of such a war effort, i.e. collecting newspapers for a school competition. There's more to this story than pulling a wagon around to collect papers. Lee's text deftly incorporates at least three types of details: selected ones from the decade, certain WW2 activity of many children, and specific cultural elements. On one page we read that on a lapel of Grandfather's coat "was a small pin with two flags - the American flag and the Chinese flag. Many Chinese men began wearing the pin with two flags after the war with Japan started so they would not be mistaken for the enemy." The story is not about Grandfather's lapel pin, but the pin is one detail that can sear into a reader's consciousness to provoke later questions or thoughts. The story quickly continues showing Nim getting ready for to go to school by putting her Chinese calligraphy supplies into a cigar box. Although attending Chinese school after a day at public school would not be a universal early 40s experience, the use of a well-made cigar box for any kind of supplies or collections probably was. Which books set during WW2 come to your mind? ... Ginny
********************* Ginny Moore Kruse (gmkruse at ccbc.soemadison.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) A Library of the School of Education (www.soemadison.wisc.edu/ccbc/)
Received on Tue 14 Oct 1997 09:06:23 PM CDT