Product Description

WW2 has just ended and twelve-year-old Rusty comes back home to Britain after being evacuated to the US. The greyness and bleakness of life in England is a shock, but even worse is adapting to the strict discipline of her family, including a brother she's never met, after the warmth and openness of her adopted American family. Rusty is sent to a horrific boarding school, before finally running away as her search for happiness becomes more and more desperate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9599 in Books
• Published on: 1987-08-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
Like Good Night, Mr. Tom, Magorian's second novel is set against the background of the WW II evacuation of British children - but otherwise we're deep in problem-drama-land. It's 1945 and Rusty, now twelve, returns to a Britain after five golden years in America - five years with a big, bohemian family, in the land of plenty and individual initiative, that have turned her into a confident, outgoing, thoroughly American preteen (advanced, in some respects, even for the 1945 US) and as much a stranger to her mother, who insists on calling her Virginia, as her mother, now a uniformed Women's Voluntary Service driver-and-mechanic, is to her. The situation is psychologically fraught - Rusty also has a four-year-old brother, Charlie, who's jealous, hostile - and it allows for lots of cross-cultural contrasts and misunderstandings. But it's also loaded - with the parallel between Rusty's newfound independence and her mother's, which both have difficulty accepting (a stock '80s theme, projected back) - and the circumstances, unexplained to start with, are increasingly implausible. I.e., why Rusty was evacuated (not from London, or another danger-zone), how she wound up with earthy, artistic Aunt Hannah and Uncle Bruno (so alien to her own stuffy family). Rusty and her mother apart, moreover, the characters are one-dimensional. There's "ruddy, white-haired" Beatie, in whose "dilapidated and rambling" house her mother is billeted, who gives Rusty the understanding and reassurance she doesn't get from her mother - who'll ultimately, predictably, die and leave the house to Rusty's mother. There's Beatie's antithesis, Rusty's paternal grandmother, the model of a malicious British snob. And worst of all is her officer-father, who proves on his return to be a mama's boy and cruel martinet. At a ghastly boarding school, Rusty is shunned for her Americanisms, even officially penalized; she suffers, loses weight and her health. But under Grandmother's harsh thumb, she and Charlie and her mother do draw closer. And, after a covert friendship with a boy-evacuee blows up (which also has a mother-parallel), Beatie's legacy brings blessed release. Rusty's misery-and-fortitude, along with the Anglo-American tensions, move the story through the 385 pages - but the most exceptional thing about the book is indeed its length. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Michelle Magorian was born in Portsmouth and on leaving school studied at the Rose Bruford College of speech and Drama and Marcel Marceau's International School of Mime in Paris. Over the years she became interested in children's books and decided to write one herself. The result was Goodnight Mister Tom, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, an International Reading Association Award and was also made into a much-loved film.