Cover illustration: Tom Clohosy Cold
A publishing marvel
Publisher Barrington Stoke does a great job in providing high quality, accessible texts for less confident or experienced readers. It is also much to their credit that so many of our best writers have contributed. As well as meeting the needs of their primary audience wonderfully well, a remarkable number of their titles make outstanding reading for any level or age, despite their simplified language and style.
My gold standard is always Anthony McGowan’s Lark, a truly sensational novel by any reckoning. Up there in quality also come Katya Balen’s Birdsong and Mal Peet’s The Family Tree. I would also most certainly include the titles contributed by Marcus Sedgwick, recently so tragically deceased. It is no recompense, but some slight comfort perhaps, that there is another Barrington Stoke title of his due early in 2023.
In this esteemed company, too, are a whole series of wartime novels from Tom Palmer. All excellent, these seem to get better and better and his latest, Resist, is a most compelling and important read.
Devastating authenticity
One of the principle strengths of this book is ((as always with this author) its authenticity. Reconstructing, as it does, life in the Netherlands in the later stages of the WWII, as experienced by the teenager who subsequently grew up to be film star Audrey Hepburn, it is fiction not biography. This means, of course, that much has been imagined, but her imagined exploits are vivid and deeply affecting not only because of the writer’s remarkable ability to recreate experience of another person, but because they are firmly and truthfully based on a great deal of thoroughly researched evidence from first-hand accounts as well as secondary sources. All of which means that the novel is not only richly informative but also deeply moving and often very harrowing. Even as someone who thought he knew the history of WWII pretty well, I must admit I had not fully appreciated the horrors experienced by those living in the occupied Netherlands at that time, or the deprivations and cruelties inflicted by the Nazis. It was a revelation, as I think it will be for many, one as as important as it is devastating.
Skilful storytelling
Reader engagement with all of this is this is secured by outstanding narrative construction. Linear it may be, but within this simple framework considerable writing skill is in evidence, The story builds and eases tensions, without ever losing the underlying terror and jeopardy that must have been continually present throughout the occupation. The voice of Edda (Audrey) is cleverly and sensitively caught and the result is a reader experience that vicariously shares every intense moment of her fears, traumas, hopes and disappointments. Real events like the Battle of Arnhem come to horrendous life, seen from her physically close and emotionally involved perspective. There is a stark reminder too of life’s reality, when even the longed for liberation is not as totally idyllic as it was so often envisaged to be.
Simplicity is all
This is a case where I find the straightforward linguistic style, albeit designed for readability, actually enhances the content. Its directness and consequent feeling of simple honesty suit the story well. Although the two books are very different in content, Resist is similar to Lark in that it captures a voice, place, and time to perfection. Here is a story of traumatic experiences which need to be absorbed into our individual and collective consciousness. So too, though, the thread of life-affirming courage and hope that runs through this very special book. Our humanity will be the greater for it.
Read this and, if you haven’t, the rest too.
