Someday We Will Fly

Author: Rachel DeWoskin

Brand: Penguin Books

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reprint

Binding: paperback

Number Of Pages: 368

Release Date: 21-01-2020

Details: Product Description
From the author of Blind, a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story set during World War II in Shanghai, one of the only places Jews without visas could find refuge.

Warsaw, Poland. The year is 1940 and Lillia is fifteen when her mother, Alenka, disappears and her father flees with Lillia and her younger sister, Naomi, to Shanghai, one of the few places that will welcome them. There they
struggle to make a life; they have no money, there is little work, no decent place to live, a culture that doesn't understand them. And always the worry about Alenka. How will she find them? Is she still alive?
  Meanwhile Lillia is growing up, trying to care for Naomi, whose development is frighteningly slow from malnourishment. She attends school sporadically, makes friends with Wei, a Chinese boy, and finds work as a performer at a "gentlemen's club" without her father's knowledge. As the conflict grows more intense, the Americans declare war and the Japanese force the Americans in Shanghai into camps. More bombing, more death. Can Lillia and her family survive, caught in the crossfire?
Review
★ "DeWoskin explores a rarely depicted topic. . .A beautifully nuanced exploration of culture and people." -
Kirkus Reviews,
starred review

★ "An unusual portrait of what war does to families in general and children in particular . . . affirms the human need for art and beauty in hard times." -
Booklist,
starred review

"A provocative exploration of what resilience means when you’re pushed to the edge." -
BCCB
About the Author
Rachel DeWoskin has spent much of her life in China, including childhood summers with her parents and brothers, excavating ancient Chinese musical and medical instruments for her dad's research. Rachel lived in Bejing for most of her twenties, where she became the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera called
Foreign Babes in Bejing. She spent the last six summers in Shanghai, where she researched and wrote
Someday We Will Fly.
Rachel lives in Chicago with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two daughters. She is on the fiction faculty of the University of Chicago and is an affiliated faculty member in Jewish studies and East Asian Studies.
Visit her at racheldewoskin.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Heime, Home
1940

I first saw Shanghai from over my father’s shoulder. I was feverish the final two weeks on the ship, as if my hair had been protecting my head and once I was without it, sickness leaked in. I missed the last three ports: Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong. Of course I wouldn’t have been allowed off the ship anyway, but I was sorry not to have seen them. When I woke, soaked with broken fever, we were descending the ship’s gangplank, Papa carrying Naomi, me, and all of our things. So I guess it was for the best that we had so little with us.

As far as I could see there were human beings, throbbing with heat, an electric mob of running, waving, shouting. There were animals and also men pulling carts, racing, climbing onto and off of boats so rickety they looked as if they’d been made by hand from paper, people entering and exiting buildings; everywhere store fronts and signs covered with slashes and dots that made a language I couldn’t understand. I reached across Papa’s neck and held Naomi’s hand. “What day is it?”

I heard him say, “July.” We had been traveling for over a month, and now it was July and we were here, in Shanghai. Out from the endless rush of people carrying meat, lumber, bricks, passengers, giant pieces of glass emerged a man on a bicycle. He was the first person I could see individually somehow. There were so many of us. He had brown skin and bright eyes, and was watching the street ahead of him. How was he balancing his bicycle? The back was stacked with so many packages it looked like a house made of boxes. A pole crossed his neck and shoulders; from each end hung pails that seemed to pull the metal down

EAN: 9780147508911

Package Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches

Languages: English