As she has done so well before, Karen Cushman returns to history to set her novel, War and Millie McGonigle, in the place where her husband grew up. A young girl in San Diego during World War II turns out to deal with issues that will be remarkably timely. Chapter headings are dates with “September 20, 1941: Saturday” as the first. A reader with only a little knowledge of history can anticipate what will be coming. Karen looks at how a family and community and especially Millie live their everyday lives with the shadow of the war looming over them.
The book’s intriguing opening has Millie drawing an octopus in her Book of Dead Things. It joins six sand dollars, a faintly orange ghost shrimp, and a tiny sand crab. In her last day with her grandmother before her death, Gram had given Millie a diary for her birthday along with an admonition. Gram had seen Millie’s sadness over the radio, newspaper, and newsreel reports about the war with bombs, destruction, and dead soldiers. She tells Millie to write and draw in her book the things that seem lost and dead because what is lost stays alive if we remember it. Little did either of them know that was the last thing Gram would say to her.
A grieving Millie makes her way through a little sister’s illness that gets all the attention, taking in Gram’s stray cousin who has nowhere else to go, living in the Depression that makes a turn into war patriotism, losing the teacher she had anticipated to Uncle Sam’s draft, a new friend adjusting from living in the city, and a community caught up in its response to the war with its changes. Then there is the good-looking Rocky, but he doesn’t go into the dead book.
Millie continues her pictures of dead things, large and small, and signing “McGonigle” in the mud like artists and authors do, following her grandmother’s instructions until it occurs to her that her grandmother may have meant something entirely different. Karen Cushman fans and lovers of historical fiction will be well satisfied with this book.