Rumors of Peace - by Ella Leffland (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"One of those deceptively guileless novels, like A Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird, that sees more than it lets on." --New York Times Book Review

"A book of acute insight and delicious humor. . . . Absorbing and poignant and full of difficult truth." --Rosellen Brown, New York Magazine

Though radio broadcasts grow more harrowing every day, and soon, swastika-marked envelopes begin to arrive from cousins overseas, but the fighting in Europe still seems far away from the idyllic California home of ten-year-old tomboy Suse Hansen. But after Pearl Harbor, everything changes. In Ella Leffland's beautifully wrought story of a young girl's coming of age during WWII, the fighting in Europe looms behind the tranquility of family, friends, and neighbors--until the darkness of the war becomes suddenly, irrevocably real.

From the Back Cover

Perhaps no novel since A Seperate Peace has so superbly captured the impingement of a world at war upon a safe and sheltered environment. The place in Mendoza, a small oil-refining town thirty miles east of San Francisco. The time encompassed is World War II, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor until the bombing of Hiroshima. The narrator and heroine of the story is the fierce yet enchanting Suse Hansen. In the intervening four years, we watch with compassion as Suse evolves from a tomboy who wishes to be a trapeze artist to a young person whose moral growth has been as remarkable as her blossoming womanhood. In Suse's perceptions of the war, in her ability to reconcile her unfolding knowledge of human nature with the horrors of the news reports she so anxiously follows, we see a growth that is all the more dramatic for the subtlety and awe with which it is portrayed.

Review Quotes

"A book of acute insight and delicious humor. . . absorbing and poignant and full of difficult truth." -- New York magazine

"A brilliant and original novel that will remain in your consciousness throughout a lifetime." -- Los Angeles Herald Examiner

"One of those deceptively guileless novels, like A Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird, that sees more than it lets on." -- New York Times Book Review

"Rumors of Peace is a rare book, a delicious recalling. It is a book to shout about." -- West Coast Review of Books