Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War

"I begged, and often my brother obliged. In the dark of night, when I couldn't sleep, Ivan told me fairy tales in a whisper. All the stories began, in the traditional Hungarian manner, `Once there was / where there wasn't / there was once a Castle / that twirled on the foot of a duck.'"

There are few female figures in literature as riveting as the precocious nine-year-old Magda Denes who narrates this story. Her stubborn self-command and irrepressible awareness of the absurd make her, in her mother's eyes, "impossibly sarcastic, bigmouthed, insolent, and far too smart" for her own good. When her family goes into hiding from the fascist Arrow-Cross, she is torn from the "castle" of intimacies shared with her adored and adoring older brother and plunged into a world of incomprehensible deprivation, separation, and loss. Her rage, and her ability to feel devastating sorrow and still insist on life, will reach every reader at the core.