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Good-Bye Marianne

by Irene N. Watts

One moment 11-year-old Marianne is heading off to school, stewing over an upcoming math test; the next she finds the school doors closed to her and ordinary life finished. For a Jewish child growing up in Nazi Germany, the event is the latest in the dark, swift disappearance of normalcy. Marianne is already struggling with her father’s disappearance: he has gone into hiding after miraculously escaping a German sweep. Every day Marianne and her mother live more and more in the shadows, and Mutti’s warning becomes a refrain: “Don’t call attention to yourself.”

But in Berlin, in November 1938, what is happening is still hard to believe. Marianne’s new friend Ernest barely distinguishes between the imaginary adventures in his favourite book, Emile and the Detectives, and his own in the Hitler Youth. And life seems much as usual in Amsterdam where Marianne’s cousin Ruth lives, like another young Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Although Good-Bye Marianne is cast as fiction, it is based in fact: the author was seven when she, like Marianne, left Germany for England in one of the first kindertransports.

To link her readers with a distant time and culture, Watts depicts Marianne as not very different from a North American child of the 1990s: feisty and self-possessed, with a prettily decorated bedroom, favourite clothes and toys, and spending money of her own. At times the voice seems too bright and breezy, and the writing has awkwardnesses of a first-novel kind – a tendency for dialogue to turn to monologue during dramatic moments, occasional slips in tone. But it does not turn away from the horror, as when Marianne sees a man leap from a window to avoid arrest. And the heartbreak of the final scene rings perfectly true, as the children board the train to safety, leaving behind everything known and loved, then draw together for comfort and support. Watts’s book sets out to do something important, and it succeeds because it leaves readers wanting urgently to know what happened next.

 

Reviewer: Maureen Garvie

Publisher: Tundra

DETAILS

Price: $8.99

Page Count: 105 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-88776-445-2

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: 1998-4

Categories: Children and YA Fiction

Age Range: ages 8–11