THE OTHER WAY ROUND

by Judith Kerr ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1975

Anna, the little girl from whom. . . Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, is now fifteen and a refugee in wartime London. Anna is pained by poverty and her halfway status (technically she is an enemy alien). And her bad dreams persist, although she stalwartly endures nighttime bombing raids. Mostly this is about Anna's persistence in finding a career; while brother Max attends Cambridge on a scholarship she quits school to learn stenotype, works for the Red Cross (one of the few jobs available to aliens), and attends art classes at night--where she develops a crush on the drawing teacher but wins a scholarship in the course of losing him. The narrative moves comfortably through Anna's various milieus--the polyglot refugee population of the Hotel Continental; the Red Cross office where local ladies come to sew and gossip over cups of Bovril; art students arguing Impressionism over their fish and chips. Anna's family are familiar types but drawn with warmth and individuality--brilliant brother Max who tries too hard to be English, a writer father who just can't adjust to learning one more language, cousin Otto who reads P. G. Wodehouse in the internment camp until he is recruited for the Manhattan project. But it is Anna's ability to share with us the problems and satisfactions of her work that is most absorbing; when she studies stenotype we discover what it's like to hear all speech as a babble of phonetic syllables and we struggle with her through the problems of learning to sketch and master oil paints. It's a pleasure to see maturity gained through a deal of hard work instead of some gimmicky one-shot insight, and Anna's acute perceptions make this quiet, self-contained memoir consistently rewarding.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975

Categories: FICTION