Couriers must have really been backed up with the Christmas season. I have been waiting for my author copies since early December. I am THRILLED that I can finally hold a copy of Making Bombs for Hitler in my own hands!
Author: Marsha
I write historical fiction, mostly from the perspective of young people who are thrust in the midst of war.
Book Review: Turn of Mind
Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I consumed this novel in a matter of hours. The premise is similar to Before I Go To Sleep. In this novel, an orthopedic surgeon who now has Alzheimer’s is accused of committing a murder. The story is revealed entirely from the point of view of Dr. Jennifer White as her mind deteriorates. What a fine juggling act Alice LaPlante does to pull this off so seamlessly.
Review: Robert Massie’s Catherine The Great
Loved this book. Catherine the Great was a bundle of contradictions. A brilliant mind and a great manipulator. Robert Massie’s well-researched and beautifully written biography does Catherine justice. I had read biographies of her before but none so thorough as this.
Massie uses an anecdotal style that is highly readable.
Miss Wondergem gruesomely delights
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A delightful picture book! Love the whimsical illos by Wendy Whittingham and love the galloping verse that rolls of the tongue. The grossness is pretty nifty too. Another sure winner for Valerie Sherrard!
The Hungry Novelist interview
Chronicling a journey to Canada
The Brant News
by Colleen Toms
November 24, 2011
Flipping through the pages of Brantford author Marsha Skrypuch’s newest book, The Last Airlift, Tuyet Yurczyszyn points to a black and white photograph.
The picture shows numerous children, including babies strapped into cardboard boxes, sitting in the belly of a Hercules aircraft.
An arrow with the name Tuyet points toward a young girl.
“That’s me right there,” Yurczyszyn said.
Skrypuch’s latest novel, her first non-fiction work, chronicles the story of Yurczyszyn’s journey to Canada as one of 57 Vietnamese orphans rescued from the city of Saigon during the Vietnam War.
Eight years old and walking with a limp as a result of polio, she was one of the oldest children in her Saigon orphanage. Her age and limp marked her as “unadoptable.”
That all changed when a Brantford couple turned up at Surrey Place in Toronto. For the first time she could remember, Yurczyszyn was part of a family. She was about to head to her new home.
The Last Airlift is an uplifting story geared toward readers in Grades 4 to 8. Skrypuch said the book not only offers insight into the fate of children in war, but also how people can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
“Whether they are children or adults, we see people walking around but we don’t know what people have gone through or what they have gone through to become Canadians,” she said. “Every single one of us has something to make them feel that they are different. With this story, the reader can have more empathy for other people.”
Upon her arrival to Canada, Yurczyszyn discovered her first blade of grass, stars in the night sky and a bed of her own. More importantly, she discovered what it was like to be part of a family with a real mom and dad.
“There were mostly nuns at the orphanage, not males so much,” she said. “I remember thinking it’s a really great feeling, like I belong to somebody now. The only thing was, my fear was always that I was going to be sent back, that I wasn’t good enough.”
Enjoying a traditional Vietnamese meal at Quan 99, Skrypuch was preparing to interview Yurczyszyn about her life growing up in Brantford as the newest daughter of John and Dorothy Morris. It will become a sequel to The Last Airlift.
“It was after interviewing Dieu and Hung Nguyen (the owners of Quan 99) in the early 1990s that first sparked my interest in Vietnamese-Canadian stories,” Skrypuch said. “It was an odd thing for Tuyet to have her childhood recorded in other people’s history. I am thankful to have been able to give that back to her.”
Yurczyszyn is now happily married to husband Darren and has two children, Luke and Bria.
come visit me at www.calla.com
I am now incorporating my blog into my website. Come on over and say hi.
Last Airlift Girls!
Here I am with Tuyết, Tuyet, and Thi Mai at the Last Airlift book launch in Toronto on November 15th — three of the girls who in 1975 were airlifted out of Saigon in the Last Airlift.
Lisa Dalrymple enjoying the launch.
Here I am with Mahtab Narsimhan and Tuyet.
Here’s me and Mahtab and Last Airlift!
Book Review: Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden is a deliciously complex tale that begins in 1913 with a four year old girl abandoned on a ship in London that is about to embark to Australia. The girl is adopted by a loving new family and she is happy until her 18th birthday, when her adoptive father gives her the small white suitcase that was hers as that 4 year old. Inside is a book of fairy tales that bring glimmers of memory back to her.
The narrative seamlessly weaves back and forth between Nell, Eliza and Cassandra, three generations of women who try to break away from the evil secret at the core of their family.
This is one of those all-consuming stories that hold the reader in thrall until the last page. It reads like a modern Bronte or Hugo.
Great review for Last Airlift!
CM gave Last Airlift 3.5/4 stars here.
Fans of Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s books will know her most recurring themes are the effects of war on children and her young protagonists’ struggles to find family and home in the wake of it. In her first nonfiction YA title, Skrypuch explores these areas of human ferocity and need once again, but this time readers experience the story through the eyes of Son Thi Anh Tuyet, the girl who actually lived it.
Rather than using the first-person point of view that is common to memoir, Skypuch has settled on a third-person narrative to tell Tuyet’s story. Here, the choice serves to echo some of the isolation and estrangement Tuyet feels, while the real and telling details obtained by the close collaboration between the author and the now-adult Tuyet pull the reader into the emotional upheaval the child Tuyet has to deal with every day.
It is 1975, and Tuyet is eight-years-old. She is housed in an orphanage in Saigon, South Vietnam. She can’t recall a time before she lived there. Inside the orphanage, she can hear helicopters and airplanes, and bombs going off. But she can’t see them because the children are not allowed to go outside, ever. Outside, the Vietnam War is going on.
Then, in April, Saigon falls to the Viet Cong, and Tuyet is thrust headlong into a journey she does not understand and of which she is even more afraid than she had been of the war and her life in the orphanage.
In the world the eight-year-old knows, only perfect children are adopted or kept alive. Tuyet is imperfect. Polio has ruined her left leg and foot. So, she has been vigilant to find ways to make herself useful enough that the nuns who run the orphanage have let her stay and have given her food. But now she is removed from the relative safety of the system she has so carefully worked out. She does not know where she’s going, or why, or what will happen when she gets there.
On each leg of the long and exhausting journey, there are new challenges and terrors Tuyet must overcome. Young readers will find themselves riding an emotional roller coaster with her as she is taken away by strangers who speak a language unintelligible to her and put aboard a van, and then an airplane filled with screaming babies. Readers will learn what she endures as she loses everything she knows, or attaches to, including the only two friends she has ever had. Nor does her ordeal end when the airplane touches down in a foreign land called Canada. But along the way, her courage and resourcefulness allow her, and her readers, to carry on.
Overall, the 24 black and white illustrations serve to increase readers’ understanding of Tuyet’s journey as she experienced it. The tanks (ill. 2 1) and the photos of the babies (ill. 3 1) and the children (ill. 4 1) inside the plane give readers a clear sense of urgency and exhausting nature of the airlift rescue scheme, while photos of Tuyet, including her arrival in Toronto (ill. 4 4), and the Morris family photo (ill. 6 2) clearly show the strain and sorrow suffered by the little girl and her clinging to the man she is still afraid might send her back to her war torn country. In the end, readers also clearly see a transformation taking place (ill. 10 1 with Linh and ill. 10 2).
Some of the illustrations caused a disruption in the flow of Tuyet’s story and might have been better placed in the endnotes. Examples are: the pilot (ill. 4 3), which shows a calm looking man readers have not gotten to know, and the care workers with other children (5 1), which lifts readers out of Tuyet’s story.
Documents, such as the birth certificate (1 1), and the adoption order (6 1), which, as it’s placed, gives away the future and reduces the tension the author is trying hard to maintain, might also be better in the endnotes.
The author’s endnotes serve to clarify another sticking point for this reader, which was that apparently neither the nuns at the orphanage nor any of the adults Tuyet met during the journey who spoke her language (and there were some) took time to sit down with the terrified girl and explain what was happening. But there is a credible explanation for that blank spot. The historical note brings readers up-to-date and lays the facts of why Tuyet’s journey was so necessary on the line.
Last Airlift is the story of an heroic deed, of one young girl’s courage and resourcefulness when she most needs it, and of the ending she could not foresee.
Highly Recommended.
Jocelyn Reekie is a writer, editor and publisher in Campbell River, BC.