![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: The Avion My Uncle Flew
Aug. 15th, 2023 04:46 pmGalloping toward the end of the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s! I just finished Cyrus Fisher's The Avion My Uncle Flew, which is a fantastic tour de force, what an amazing book.
The book takes place just after the end of World War II. John's father is still doing post-war work in France; John and his mother go to join him, and then John is sent to stay in his mother's ancestral village of St. Chamant with his uncle Paul Langres ("mon oncle"), who is building an airplane (or rather a glider, as John realizes with chagrin) which he hopes will repair the family fortunes, which hit rock bottom when the Nazis burnt down the ancestral Langres home. But the mayor of the town, who is trying to be the Langres land at rock-bottom prices, keeps interfering with his plans...
This book is many things, and one of them is an exciting thriller, which is not a genre much represented among the Newbery award winners. It's quite tense! When John visits the wreck of the Langres house, he finds a knapsack hanging from one of the intact walls, containing... drumroll please!... a Nazi revolver, showing that a Nazi soldier is still hiding in the mountains!
( Spoilers )
The book takes place just after the end of World War II. John's father is still doing post-war work in France; John and his mother go to join him, and then John is sent to stay in his mother's ancestral village of St. Chamant with his uncle Paul Langres ("mon oncle"), who is building an airplane (or rather a glider, as John realizes with chagrin) which he hopes will repair the family fortunes, which hit rock bottom when the Nazis burnt down the ancestral Langres home. But the mayor of the town, who is trying to be the Langres land at rock-bottom prices, keeps interfering with his plans...
This book is many things, and one of them is an exciting thriller, which is not a genre much represented among the Newbery award winners. It's quite tense! When John visits the wreck of the Langres house, he finds a knapsack hanging from one of the intact walls, containing... drumroll please!... a Nazi revolver, showing that a Nazi soldier is still hiding in the mountains!
( Spoilers )
