When grave misfortune leaves thirteen-year-old Terry Sayre without relatives to care for him in the summer of 1939, his only option to elude foster care is to accept asylum abroad with his mother's Danish kin, people he met only briefly as a child. Terry begins life anew in his grandparents' home, but within months of his arrival, the Second World War breaks out. Terry's older self recounts his precarious coming of age as an alien marooned in a disconcerting new land throughout its long national nightmare. Spared the savage treatment Nazi Germany dealt other countries it conquered, Denmark was allowed to remain nominally self-governing. Good fortune, though, did not allow the proud, peaceloving little kingdom to escape the toll the war took on its people's collective soul. Hamlet's Children by Richard Kluger is the story of a young American's wrenching assimilation with his Danish relatives and of how he is pinioned in the same cruel vise with his adopted countrymen as they cunningly attempt to subvert the Germans' iron grip on their kingdom. Paramount on this agenda of defiance is the Danes' persistent effort to keep their Jewish neighbors out of the Nazis' murderous hands. Vibrant with memorable characters and fraught with tension, this artfully crafted narrative, both heartbreaking and uplifting, is a testament to the human spirit in its bleakest hours.
