Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy.
Where? To the circus, of course.įortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz-sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. The slow dismantling of Petra’s faith in her loved ones adds a delicious instability to the growing unease of this WWII thriller Strange’s deft hand with the had-I-but-known flavor of foreshadowing maintains a beautifully eerie, slightly gothic tone (occasionally at the expense of a believable 12-year-old voice). The (historically accurate) increasing maltreatment of the town’s German-British and Italian-British families increases Petra’s sense of dislocation in her previously cozy village setting (characters are all white). The stakes seem to rise slowly, coming to a breaking point as Petra’s personal tragedies intertwine with the grim reality of the Dunkirk evacuation. Could it be that Petra’s nearest and dearest aren’t what they seem? No one in her family is acting normally. Her German-born mother is accused of treason and sent to an internment camp, and though Petra is confident of Mutti’s innocence, someone has been sending state secrets to the Nazis. When the war begins, some of the villagers-her neighbors for her entire life-behave abominably to Petra’s family. Twelve-year-old Petra lives in a lighthouse on the coast of England, so close to Europe that she can see right across to France on a clear day. An English girl whose mother is German is ensnared by her neighbors’ bigotry and by apparent treason at the onset of World War II.
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