Harboring Hope

January 23, 2023
Focusing on Henny Sinding (b. 1921), daughter of a respected Royal Danish Navy commander, Hood’s expansive verse recounting of the WWII Danish resistance movement builds a strong sense of shared Danish values while encompassing Nazi Germany’s 1940 invasion and its deportation of Danish Jews after years of “peaceful occupation.” Compared to Pippi Longstocking for her compassion and unconventionality, and taught from childhood to maintain a “good inner moral compass,” Sinding was as a young woman instrumental in helping more than 800 people flee from occupied Denmark; she personally escorted 300 individuals to a 12–meter lighthouse supply boat, the Gerda III, which took them across the Øresund strait to safety in Sweden. Effectively unadorned free verse from Hood (Alias Anna) capably renders the suspense and danger in numerous scenes of Sinding at work. It also traces Denmark’s slow transformation from a stance of neutrality to becoming what Hitler described as “a model protectorate” to fighting back against German forces in August 1943. Numerous excerpts from Sinding’s and others’ first-person accounts personalize the history, while the format helps to funnel a wide breadth of material into an accessible narrative. Extensive back matter includes contextualizing information and historical photographs. Ages 10–up. Agent: Brenda Bowen, Book Group. (Mar.)■

February 1, 2023
A story highlighting elements of Denmark's role in the Second World War, with an inspiring young hero at its center. Denmark is one of the few countries with a World War II record to be proud of--according to the book, 7,742 of the country's 8,250 Jews survived with the brave assistance of non-Jewish citizens--so Hood's choice to focus on the rare uplifting story from this period is a sound one. Twenty-two-year-old Henny Sinding, the daughter of a naval officer, helped smuggle hundreds of Jews to safety in Sweden on the Gerda III, a boat that was originally used to maintain buoys and lighthouses. Hood tells us that "people later compared Henny to / Pippi Longstocking, / the playful, / unconventional, / compassionate, / 'strongest girl in the world, ' " and also that "like the Little Mermaid, / Henny discovered / that being human can be painful." But these intriguing insights are not centered, rather smothered by hundreds of pages that slowly unfold, tracing the Danish role in the war and sometimes reading like children's encyclopedia entries with line breaks. And if the line breaks are intended to help reluctant readers by putting fewer words on each page, the vocabulary and sentence construction used often work against accessibility and comprehension. The book is very long, and it is neither lively nor lyrical. A bit of a slog for the target audience. (author's note, who's who, map, historical notes, photographs, poetry notes, sources, bibliography) (Verse nonfiction. 10-14)

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