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If you are interested in children's literature of this century and/or about Blitz evacuees then you must read it... but you've probably already heard of it and don't need me telling you.
There's not much I can say in a review that hasn't been extensively covered before, and I'd want to re-read before typing up a review, but I will say this: It continually surprises me that when people recommend this book, they frame it as a book about a (poor, abused) girl with a physical disability (untreated clubfoot) being evacuated. Hardly anybody starts off saying it's a girl with chronic PTSD being evacuated, but that's by far the more disabling condition for Ada, and also the more convincingly written, probably because the author herself has chronic PTSD but doesn't have a clubfoot. (I'd be surprised if she did. Even in the 1940s it was pretty rare to see untreated clubfoot in the West, wasn't it?) The clubfoot is worked around with crutches, a pony, and eventually a surgery. The mental illness is harder to handle.
(Also, another main character is suffering from depression, and while the current bout is clearly related to the death of her partner, Becky, she states outright that she's always been prone to depression and seasonal depression, though she doesn't use those words. This is very much a book about mental illness as a disability, and not so much about clubfoot or WWII. Those are just the setting.)
There's not much I can say in a review that hasn't been extensively covered before, and I'd want to re-read before typing up a review, but I will say this: It continually surprises me that when people recommend this book, they frame it as a book about a (poor, abused) girl with a physical disability (untreated clubfoot) being evacuated. Hardly anybody starts off saying it's a girl with chronic PTSD being evacuated, but that's by far the more disabling condition for Ada, and also the more convincingly written, probably because the author herself has chronic PTSD but doesn't have a clubfoot. (I'd be surprised if she did. Even in the 1940s it was pretty rare to see untreated clubfoot in the West, wasn't it?) The clubfoot is worked around with crutches, a pony, and eventually a surgery. The mental illness is harder to handle.
(Also, another main character is suffering from depression, and while the current bout is clearly related to the death of her partner, Becky, she states outright that she's always been prone to depression and seasonal depression, though she doesn't use those words. This is very much a book about mental illness as a disability, and not so much about clubfoot or WWII. Those are just the setting.)
