Discovering a Grandmother’s Wartime Past: A Review of Skylark & Wallcreeper

When Superstorm Sandy floods much of New York City in 2012, 12-year-old Lily is visiting her grandmother Collette in a Queens nursing home, where she often volunteers to help other residents as well. This time, she’s pressed into service, assisting in the evacuation of her grandmother and everyone else to the Brooklyn Armory. Afraid it will be lost or stolen, Lily’s grandmother entrusts her with a Montblanc pen with a special engraving – but Lily promptly loses the pen on a Brooklyn street while searching for food for the evacuees. Over the next week, as the city cleans up and tries to get back to normal, Lily’s search for the pen – or a look-alike replacement – becomes a journey to discover Collette’s past as a member of a World War II French Resistance cell known as Noah’s Ark because of the animal codenames its members were given.

Debut middle grade author Anne O’Brien Carelli intersperses Lily’s contemporary first-person narrative with the third-person narrative of 12-year-old Collette living in Brume, a town in Vichy France under the thumb of the Nazis and their French collaborators. Colette earns the codename Wallcreeper because of her ability to scale rock faces in the course of delivering messages and chemicals used to blow up railroad tracks and military installations. The Montblanc pen is what she uses to record the delivery of phony packages; the X’s record the receipt of messages to carry out a Resistance operation that night or cancel because it would be too dangerous. In the course of her work, Collette, who dresses as a boy, often works with the daughter of one of the town’s wealthiest residents; the parents of “Skylark” invite Nazi officials to their home to spy for the Resistance.

The novel does an effective job of weaving together the dual timelines that portray such disparate events, bringing them together in a surprise journey near the end. The chapters set during the war are gripping; in those dangerous times, life could end at any moment. The girls’ courage, resourcefulness, and close friendship will inspire readers, though they will also experience a sense of regret and loss in seeing how such brave comrades fell out of touch with each other. In this gentle story, loss and grief do not require the death of a character. In both past and present, one sees the impact of loss of place, loss of contact, and in the case of Collette, the gradual loss of her memory and personality as a result of Alzheimer’s. But in the escapades of Skylark and Wallcreeper and in the kindness and perseverance of Lily, one sees the power of youthful idealism and hope.

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