Summer of the War - Hardcover

Grade 6-8–The yearly summer pleasures of a Michigan cottage away from the stress of school, work, and city life are interrupted in 1942 for 14-year-old Belle and her family. Wartime has required her parents to stay behind with her father supervising the production of warplanes and her mother returning to her medical practice, covering for male doctors leaving for the army and navy. Belle and her three siblings return to their grandparents' cottage and are joined by their 15-year-old cousin, Carrie, who has been raised, following her mother's death, in Paris and Washington, DC, and whose father is in war-besieged Europe. Belle anticipates much-needed friendship and camaraderie, yet Carrie arrives with a sophisticated and arrogant demeanor, upsetting the normally simple lifestyle of her family. Whelan masterfully paints a tension-filled story of two opposite worlds colliding and clashing with one another through her well-developed principal characters. Belle's first-person narrative expresses her mixed feelings, from excitement about the arrival of a new relative to bewildered disappointment in and anger toward her unappreciative, snobby cousin. When Carrie's father is killed in a bomb raid in London, the entire family must not only come to terms with his death, but also with the mutual adjustment that permanently living with their orphaned cousin will require. Whelan aptly combines themes of war, death, loss, adjustment, and coming of age through her symbolic references of both personal and global warfare. A worthy, discussable page-turner.–Rita Soltan, Youth Services Consultant, West Bloomfield, MI
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