No Tears in Ireland : A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Quaint story that begged to be more.
Review: I wanted to have an emotional attachment with this book. I really did. The little girl perspective war time story drew me to its pages, but Couterie's description of her and her sister's calamitous four years of solitude couldn't hold me there. Coming from this perspective, perhaps we are supposed to be held aloof from some of the facts surrounding their isolation. Perhaps Couturie herself never discovered some of the mysteries behind their abandonment by their parents, who couldn't make it to Ireland on one occasion but had no trouble on another, or why no letters ever arrived from them but dozens came from the rest of the world. The book ended leaving me feeling more sorry that they made it home to parents who didn't seem to want them to begin with.
Excluding all the mysteries of the book, the characters themselves never seem real. There were very few times throughout my reading that I felt any sort of emotional attachment to them. Maybe Sylvia's physical isolation in the story rendered her incapable of exhibiting anything other than loneliness--the only true thing that is captured in this novel, that has the promise of being so much more.
To be fair, maybe I read this memoir to soon after finishing Angela's Ashes, which provokes so much sympathy and emotional attachments with its characters. Maybe Ms. Couturie wanted no more than to relay a quaint story, almost journal-like in its documentation of characters who are never introduced and places that are never described.
Overall, it is a good look at one person's perspective on the war and growing up in spite of it. One cannot expect it to be anything more.

Rating:
Summary: A Teenage Girl's Tragic Coming of Age During WWII
Review: In this true-life story about her life during the WWII years 1939-45, Sylvia Couturie reminds us of the often ignored fact that the horrors of war also engulfed children, many of whom were sent by their parents to far-off lands in order to be safe from the invading Germans.
No one knew, when Sylvia and her little sister Marguerite were taken by their Irish nanny back to Ireland for a month in August 1939, that the children would not see home again until February 1945.
Sylvia takes us from her idyllic childhood years, growing up in a wealthy French family in the Chateau le Mesnil located in Normandy, to the desperate poverty inforced by an overly strict and calculating nanny, in a wreck of a cottage by the stormy Atlantic. There they had "no electricity, no running water, no bathroom, and the lavatory was outside down three steps next to the kitchen door". The nanny refused opportunities for their education or better housing. Fiercely Catholic, she shunned opportunities for the children to be educated or to have playmates for fear that their minds might be poisoned by the Protestants. Wally, the nanny, claimed to have been given sole guardianship of the children "for the duration".
Ms. Couturie's writing is cleverly absorbing as, by leaving out the answers to questions which arise in the reader's mind, she exemplifies the wasteland that was her life during those most important years when only her body and instinct for survival grew from little girlhood to womanhood. Using this technique, she carries the reader along with the suspense of not knowing the answers to obvious questions, thereby creating in the reader's mind the very void that was her life during the years of WWII.
The fact that she writes this memoir more than 50 years after the fact is a testimony to the life-long effects of the tragedies of war.

Recommended for all ages, but especially for middle and junior high school libraries.