Fing's War
Fing's War
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Written by Benny Lindelauf
Translated from Dutch by John Nieuwenhuizen
The Boon family and their indefatigable gallows humor are back in Benny Lindelauf’s follow-up to Nine Open Arms.
Poised to win a scholarship to the nearby teachers college, Fing has high hopes. It’s 1938 and her poor family of nine—one father, four brothers, three sisters, and a grandmother—has finally managed to eke out a living in the tiny cigar factory abutting their dilapidated home. But smelling success, her dreamer of a father is determined to expand and Fing’s dreams fall apart when she instead has to go to work for the Cigar Emperor, taking care of his new, German wife’s eccentric niece. The novel’s gripping language, enriched by Yiddish, German, and Dutch dialect, plunges the reader into the world of a large, colorful, motherless family as they navigate the changes World War II visits upon their little town on the border of the Netherlands and Germany. This stand-alone follow-up to Nine Open Arms, a 2015 Batchelder Honor book translated from Dutch, is a fantasy, a historical novel, and literary fiction all wrapped into one.
ISBN: 978-1-59270-269-5
6" (W) x 8.88" (H) • 376 pages • HCJ
AWARDS AND REVIEWS
★ "Hard battles form this satisfying novel's throughline, some fought in the open but most won or lost in the heart." —STARRED REVIEW, Kirkus Reviews
"One of the great postwar temptations for storytellers is to equip their characters with a moral clarity that comports with the judgments of history. Mr. Lindelauf resists this, instead conveying the bewilderments of the time as seen by unworldly children and teenagers. By 1940, for instance, German troops have moved into the town, and Fing tells us: “The only dead civilian was a man who had fallen from the church steeple. It was a strange story. Not only was the window in the tower so high up that it was just about impossible to reach . . . but the man who died was not even a Catholic but a Jew.” We’re also shown how other people’s suffering can seem peripheral until suffering comes knocking at our own door. In the early chapters, Fing’s father and older brothers seem like background figures until suddenly—shockingly—the Germans take them away. With great skill, Mr. Lindelauf lays out delicate narrative threads that he then ties together in unexpected ways in this tender, harrowing novel for readers ages 12 and older." —Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
“As the Jews [in Fing’s town] are rounded up, the townspeople’s true selves are revealed, long-held secrets are divulged, and daring plans are put into place. It all works out in the end, but what a rollicking, roller coaster ride we go on to get there…More than another Holocaust story, Fing’s War provides an excellent setting for the Jewish values of honoring one’s elders, welcoming the stranger, taking care of the sick, and more. If adding this title to your Middle Grade library collection, be sure to add the first book as well.”—Kathy Bloomfield, Association of Jewish Libraries News & Reviews
"Highly recommended…Lindelauf’s ambitious novel is an unsparing exploration of life in Nazi occupied Europe and of the painful internal life of an adolescent girl trapped in a world where nothing is what it seems. Lindelauf’s skill in pacing the narrative causes each individual choice to take place within a sea of multiple possibilities. Early in the novel, Fing describes her attachment to Nine Open Arms, her family’s ramshackle old home: “Every time our house appeared at the end of the road…I tried to see it the way someone else would see it, someone not familiar with it.” Her insight is equally valid as a view of the novelist’s technique in Fing’s War, where complex characters with uncertain fates challenge the reader to keep pace with history. “ -Emily Schneider, Jewish Book Council