SuitabookFamily memory and inheritance
Lily cares for Collette during evacuation and learns about her grandmother through the hidden pen and letters.
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Book details
Anne O'Brien Carelli - Author
This is a dual-timeline adventure about a girl’s search for a lost family object and her discovery of an older generation’s wartime story. Its focus falls on loyalty, memory, courage and helping others in crisis.
While helping her granny Collette evacuate to a makeshift shelter in Brooklyn during Superstorm Sandy, Lily uncovers secrets of her grandmother's past as a member of the French Resistance during WWII. Queens, 2012. Hurricane Sandy is flooding New York City, and Lily is at a nursing home with her grandmother, Collette. Lily visits Collette often, as she is beginning to lose her memories. When the National Guard shows up to evacuate the building and take them to safety at the Park Slope armory in Brooklyn, Lily's granny suddenly produces a red box she's hidden in a closet for years. Once they get to safety, Lily opens the box, where she finds an old, beautiful Montblanc pen. Granny tells Lily that the pen is very important and that she has to take care of it, as well as some letters written in French. But Lily loses the pen in the course of helping other nursing home residents, and as she searches the city trying to find it, she learns more about her grandmother's past in France and begins to uncover the significance of the pen with the help of her best friend, a quirky pen expert, and a larger-than-life, off-Broadway understudy. Told in alternating sections (2012 and 1944), this engaging book explores a deep friendship during difficult times and the importance of family.
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Sign in for personalised guidanceThis is a dual-timeline adventure about a girl’s search for a lost family object and her discovery of an older generation’s wartime story. Its focus falls on loyalty, memory, courage and helping others in crisis.
Lily cares for Collette during evacuation and learns about her grandmother through the hidden pen and letters.
Young Colette delivers messages, counts German soldiers and helps derail a train while living under Nazi occupation.
During the evacuation, Lily helps nursing-home residents, searches flood-affected New York for the pen and receives help from friends.
The story includes flooding, evacuation, memory loss associated with dementia, Nazi occupation, secret Resistance work, threatened arrest and torture, sabotage, and an exploding cigarette case. The intensity of these scenes is not fully established.
This is a grounded book brief while Suitabook strengthens the analysis: the book’s treatment of its main themes is not yet firm enough; some draft conclusions still depend on unresolved evidence.
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