Now eighty, Felix, whom we met in two previous novels by Morris Gleitzman, is living in hot dry country Australia. In Once (2005), little Felix escaped from a convent, desperate to find his parents, not understanding that they had left him there in an effort to protect him. In Then (2005), he was ten. After jumping from a train bound for a concentration camp, he struggled to hide himself and six-year-old Zelda, who was not even Jewish, from the Nazis in Poland.
Once and Then are so powerful, so pitch perfect, so uncompromising in their depiction of Nazi horrors, so eloquent in the depiction of the courage and kindness of many, that this final book struggles to match them. The two previous books are tiny masterpieces which are entirely credible in making the unconscionable comprehensible and bearable for young (and older) readers.
Now by Morris Gleitzman
Viking $19.95 pb, 176 pp
Where There’s Smoke by John Heffernan
Omnibus Books, $17.95 pb, 205 pp
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