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Anna, Daniel, and Lucas seem to be living a dream. While their parents take care of a castle, they have the run of the grounds and the beautiful surrounding countryside. Their only concern is how best to catch the mysterious pike that lurks in the deep water of the moat. But when Daniel and Lucas’s mother first begins to seem tired all the time, and then loses her hair, Anna wonders what is going on. It is cancer, she is told, but Daniel and Lucas must not know. As the summer days grow shorter and the colors of the fields and flowers change, the boys eventually learn of their mother’s illness. Daniel becomes convinced that catching the pike will bring luck that it might even cure his mother. But as her condition worsens, these three true friends can only wish that they could stop the destructive march of time. Jutta Richter’s powerful prose makes this sensitive story set during a summer idyll an unforgettable one.
In German novelist Richter's American debut, Anna both narrates and experiences the powerless bewilderment of her friends, siblings Daniel and Lucas, whose mother contracts cancer. As summer arrives, the boys' mother, Gisela, returns from the hospital and weakens progressively. When Gisela begins to wear headscarves, Anna asks her own mother, "Is Gisela going bald?" Informed of the cancer, Anna promises not to tell the boys. The heroine witnesses the pain endured not only by Gisela's family, but her own single mom (caring for both Gisela and the boys). Anna suffers in turn, longing for more closeness with her mother, and rekindling affectionate memories of her absent father. Daniel and Lucas cope through endless hours of fishing near the manor, in which the two families live, and follow Daniel's plan to catch a huge resident pike. "I don't believe in God anymore," he tells Anna. "I only believe in the pike. In the pike-god. And that I'll manage to catch him. All by myself. And when I've done it, then Mom will get better again!" The translation bumps just slightly in spots: dialogue garners a surfeit of exclamation points, and residents who gossip about Gisela's travails are labeled "yahoos." Inevitably, all of Daniel's delusions fall away with the last pages of this brief, quietly observed elegy to childhood's last flashes of innocence. Ages 8-13. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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