Today The Bird in the Bamboo Cage by Hazel Gaynor
Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning, New York Times, USA Today, and Irish Times, bestselling author of historical fiction, including her debut The Girl Who Came Home, for which she received the 2015 RNA Historical Novel of the Year award. The Lighthousekeeper's Daughter was shortlisted for the 2019 HWA Gold Crown award. She is published in thirteen languages and nineteen countries. Hazel is co-founder of creative writing events, The Inspiration Project, and currently lives in Ireland with her family, though originally from Yorkshire. Join Hazel's Book Club Newsletter
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About the book
China, 1941. With Japan’s declaration of war on the Allies, Elspeth Kent’s future changes forever. When soldiers take control of the missionary school where she teaches, comfortable security is replaced by rationing, uncertainty and fear.
Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe at Chefoo School. Now the enemy, separated indefinitely from anxious parents, the children must turn to their teachers – to Miss Kent and her new Girl Guide patrol especially – for help. But worse is to come when the pupils and teachers are sent to a distant internment camp. Unimaginable hardship, impossible choices and danger lie ahead.
Inspired by true events, this is the unforgettable story of the life-changing bonds formed between a young girl and her teacher, in a remote corner of a terrible war.
Review
This story is inspired by true events, one of many stories of survival during wartime. Where survival becomes a question of supporting each other in any way you can. In this case how Elspeth, Minnie and the teachers become more than just people educating the children in their care when their school ends up in the middle of wartime conflict and they are incarcerated in internment camps.
Any children away at school, boarding school, regardless of where that may be, have to adapt to being alone. Sometimes they are lucky and there are adults who function as surrogate parental figures. In the internment camp those adults, the structure they provide and the hope they keep alive - it's what helps everyone survive the horror of their experience. Simultaneously the children give strength to each other and the adults, despite the dire conditions and the fear.
Given the horrendous atrocities of the Holocaust and events taking place in Europe during WW2, other countries and areas involved in that war in particular tend to be overshadowed. The war in the Pacific and the atrocities committed during the Japanese occupation, especially in the internment camps for instance. Unlike other countries the Japanese are still unwilling to take accountability for many of their crimes before, during and after the war - Comfort women are an excellent example of that.
Gaynor is absolutely right when she writes how important it is to share the experiences, eyewitness accounts and memories of survivors and those involved in such a life-changing decade during the 20th century. As we commemorate and ask old and new generations alike to remember key events in history that changed our landscape and thought processes forever, it's equally as important to tell them the stories that are slipping into obscurity for the majority of the world.
Gaynor does an excellent job of recreating the emotional distress, which combined with the endurance of the men, women and children and the historical context results in a tender and heartfelt read.
Buy The Bird in the Bamboo Cage at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: HarperCollins; pub date 20 Aug. 2020 - Hardback | £12.00. Buy at Amazon com. Buy at Waterstones.
I do like the sound of this one. I have been interested in the Pacific theatre of war for a long time, maybe because it is much closer to home for us.
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