Lily's Crossing (1997)

Hazel Rochman (Booklist, February 1, 1997 (Vol. 93, No. 11))
With wry comedy and intense feeling, and without intrusive historical detail, Giff gets across a strong sense of what it was like on the home front during World War II. Lily makes up stories about her involvement with spies, submarines, and anti-Nazi plots in her small seaside town in 1944, but underlying her melodrama and lies is grief for her dead mother. When Lily's father has to leave to fight in France, she is so hurt and furious that she refuses even to say good-bye to him. As she gets to know Albert, an orphaned Hungarian refugee, she learns about his secret anguish: he is guilt-stricken about the younger sister he left behind (he, also, didn't say good-bye), and he is determined, somehow, to cross the ocean and find her. The happy ending, when Lily's father finds Albert's sister in France, is too contrived, but the reunion scenes at home are heartbreaking. The friendship story is beautifully drawn: both Lily and Albert are wary, reluctant, and needy; they quarrel as much as they bond, and in the end, they help each other to be brave. Category: Middle Readers. 1997, Delacorte, $14.95. Gr. 5-8.

CCBC (Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, 1997)
Although Lily generally looks forward to spending the summer at her family's vacation home in Rockaway, the summer of 1944 is different. For one thing, her best friend Margaret has moved away for the summer and, for another, her father has gone to fight in the War. Left with just her stern grandmother for company, lonely Lily tries to make friends with the only person close to her own age: Albert, a Hungarian refugee spending the summer in Rockaway. Lily initiates the friendship with a lie by telling Albert she is planning to swim to a ship that will take her to Europe so that she can find her father. She promises Albert that he can join her. As their friendship grows throughout the summer, so, too, does the lie and Lily simply doesn't know how to stop it before it leads to tragedy. Details of time and place are skillfully interwoven into a story that features well-rounded, believable characters. Throughout, Giff provides plenty of dramatic tension by contrasting Lily's private thoughts with her public actions, until she is ultimately able to merge the two in Lily's powerful crossing into adolescence. CCBC categories: Fiction for Children; Historical People, Places and Events. 1997, Delacorte, 180 pages, $14.95. Ages 9-14.