Children of the Stars - Mario Escobar

Jacob and Moses flee through France after they escape a deportation dragnet in Paris in 1942. They are searching for their parents who had gone into hiding in Valence a year before, leaving them with their aunt in Paris, with the assumption that no one would go after the kids. What follows is a heart-wrenching search for their parents, and a story of survival despite the odds stacked up against them.

I love Mario Escobar’s writing style, it is both simple and deeply beautiful, a mix that helps keep the narrative flowing but still makes you stop at times to savor the delicate wording of a sentence. I was excited to read this book as I grew up near Lyon and Valence, surrounded by the mountains where the presence of the maquis is still felt today. While I enjoyed the story, it wasn’t exactly as brilliant as I was expecting it to be. I ended up racing through it too fast, just because I was invested in the boys’ story, but felt that there wasn’t enough to pull me down and sit still for a minute. I think I will reread it again in a month or two, just to savor the story better. After finishing I realize that I read it too much through the eyes of an adult and not enough through those of a child. My 13 year old self would have held this book very close to her heart.

I also felt that there was too much naivety in the novel. Granted, it is written through the boys eyes, and at 12/13 and 8/9, they are still young and innocent to the evils of the world. However, it’s the naivety of the adults that strikes me a slightly incredulous. The children’s parents escape Nazi Germany and settle in France, but refuse to think that the kids would be in danger in Nazi-occupied Paris? In 1941 things were already pretty dire in Paris, and surely the parents would have witnessed what the Germans did to Jewish children in Germany? If their aunt was unregistered why were the children registered as Jews? I also thought that for a 12/13 year old Jacob was a little naive too. 

I however decided about a quarter of the way through the book to stop questioning the details and to just enjoy the prose and the story. Because ultimately Children of the Stars is a story of survival, endurance, love, and that despite the evil that may surround us there will always be shimmers of light, beacons of hope. 

France has a very interesting and extremely difficult history when it comes to WW2. On the one hand there were collaborators who took advantage of the hatred the Nazis brought with them, on the other there were the amazing amount of people who did everything in their power to resist against the Germans and help those persecuted. There were many villages like Vassieux-en-Vercors were the populations were massacred in retaliation by German troops after the Résistance uprising in 1944, or like Chambon sur Lignon where thousands of Jews were sheltered during the war (this area appears in the book). I found that Mario Escobar manages to evoke this wide variety of human reactions and thoughts in his novel, as we see so many different characters react in so many different ways to the children. This was the part of the novel that I appreciated the most: the way the author portrays the array of characters who come in contact with the children and how they help and/or try to harm them. This is a solid 3.5 stars for me! 

Tomorrow (01/27/2020) is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I am grateful to writers such as Mario Escobar who continue to write about, and educate people on, the atrocities that happened during the second world war. We must never forget.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.