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The cover of A Faraway Island, a Swedish novel by Annika Thor just translated into English, is utterly bland. Looking at the stock art of two girls looking out into the sepia-toned distance, I had a hard time getting myself to start reading. But now I’m embarrassed about that judging-a-book-by-its-cover cliché, because the story is deeply compelling. The first of four books in a popular Swedish series, A Faraway Island tells of 12-year-old Steffie and 8-year-old Nellie, Jewish Austrian sisters who are among 500 children sent as refugees to Sweden during the run-up to World War II. Though these children are the lucky ones, Steffie doesn’t feel that way: She struggles to learn Swedish and is racked with homesickness, even as her sister picks up the language with ease and settles in. Poor Steffie’s only solace is her parents’ promise to come to claim the girls within a year. But this rescue, of course, grows more and more uncertain as Hitler continues to clamp down on Jews and ramp up his world-domination ambitions. The novel has much in common with the American Girl books: It makes a gentle history lesson, and a moral lesson about accepting differences, into a page-turner.
- Fear Factor:
(Hitler and the plight of the Jews are discussed, but only vaguely.)
- Heart:
(Steffie’s loneliness, and slowly growing fear for her parents and the future, are moving.)
- Attitude:
(Steffie rebels—understandably—against her surrogate mother, a harsh woman who initially refuses to allow her to continue her education past sixth grade.)
- Psst: After reading the descriptions of the food, I have no urge ever to sample Swedish cuisine.
- If you like this: Anne of Green Gables is a similar tale of struggling to settle into a new, remote home, though Anne’s certainly sunnier than Steffie. Number the Stars is another tale of escaping the Nazis by heading to Sweden, but it’s much tenser than the mild A Faraway Island. Twenty and Ten is another good story about the Jews during the Nazi era.
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