SUMMER OF MY GERMAN SOLDIER/MORNING IS A LONG TIME COMING

I started a book club at work that will read only young-adult novels. I wanted to do this because (a) They’re short, and every other book club I’ve been in has ultimately fizzled out when people stop finishing the books; (b) They’re fun and interesting; and (c) There are a lot of YA novels, particularly from the 1970s and 80s, that I want to revisit or that I missed the first time around, and I figured the nostalgia journey would be more fun when shared by others. I picked Summer of My German Soldier, the book by Bette Greene about a Jewish girl who shelters a runaway German POW in 1940s Arkansas, because I knew there would be a lot of discussion fodder and because I hadn’t reread it since my original middle-school experience. But whoa, what a difference a few decades make! What I remembered about the book was its impressive, delicious sadness, sitting as it did at the junction of two major tropes that are like catnip to YA girls: WWII (for some reason every teen girl I knew went through a phase of being obsessed with the Holocaust) and Romeo-and-Julietesque star-crossed young lovers. I still think the period and setting are interesting—you don’t see a lot of books about Jews in the South in the 1940s, period—but the sweet romance I remember fetishizing as a kid? Is really a friendship between a man in his early twenties and a 12-year-old girl. Sure, Patty has a crush on Anton (a crush my young self apparently shared, to have built up their relationship in my memory), but his attitude toward her, save for one kiss at the end, is pretty much brotherly/mentorlike, and they don’t even share that many scenes together. Instead, this is mainly a book about Patty’s coming of age in less than ideal conditions (isolated in a bigoted small town with a physically abusive father and emotionally abusive mother). It was good, but startlingly different from what I remembered—I must have pretty much missed the point the first time around.

While looking for the book in the library catalog, I learned there was a sequel, Morning Is a Long Time Coming, about Patty traveling to Europe to look for Anton’s family after graduating from high school, so I checked that out too. It was interesting to see what happened to Patty and see her gain some independence and confidence, but all her hardships don’t necessarily make her a likable character, and ultimately her angst annoyed me. Our group had a great discussion about these books, I enjoyed revisiting SoMGS, and both of them were well written, but I didn’t find them lovable.