Glory can’t believe it… the Hanging Moss Community Pool is closing right before her July Fourth birthday.

The closing of her favorite swimming pool opens 11-year-old Gloriana Hemphill’s eyes to the ugliness of racism in a small Mississippi town in 1964. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.Ī deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards-not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events-but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction ( Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction-a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.įive years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. It doesn’t bear up under scrutiny, but it’s fun to read. Each chapter begins with a bit of hawk lore (not sourced). Matty/Marian’s uncanny communication with her hawks takes the novel into the realm of fantasy as she slips into the mind of bird after bird to effect her own rescue, bring ransom to Eleanor of Aquitaine and declare her love for Fynn/Robin. Flash-forward: Matty has metamorphosed into Marian and Fynn into Robin Hood, paving the way for more derring-do.

Loyal to King Richard, Matty, Fynn and a host of local lads work to keep their families fed and Prince John hassled-and then to raise the funds to ransom Richard when he is captured.

When Prince John and his allies murder Matty’s mother for her jewels, her father pines away. She begins to understand hawk language, getting inside their minds as she trains them. Matty and Fynn are childhood friends, playing together when Matty is not being taught by her father, Lord William, to work with hawks. Veteran Lasky combines the Robin Hood/Maid Marian story with falconry.

Hawksmaid by Kathryn Lasky