LILLI'S QUEST

A companion to Isabel’s War (2014) fills in and expands the story of the girl known as Helga, explaining why Lilli, and not her younger sister, the real Helga, was on the Kindertransport to England.

Lilli’s time on a rough English farm with cold guardians is entirely different from life with her own family in Germany as the war began. Events on the farm become so difficult that she is moved to a school where "land girls" are trained to work as farmers. There, things improve: there are friends, enough food, sanitation, social occasions. She meets a German prisoner of war, Karl, a sensitive, sympathetic, and intelligent young man working on an English farm. She is abruptly pulled from this life in 1941 to join relatives in the United States. There Lilli's story switches from a third-person, present-tense account to her own first-person, past-tense narration (though both are formal and old-fashioned). She fills in events mentioned in the previous book, makes more male friends, and continues to search for the real Helga. Perl recaps the events of the war as she goes, which is probably needed since the book covers a long span, 1938-1946, but it is also a liability. The reading is slowed by the flatness of the characters, who are in the story but don't walk off the pages.

A not-particularly-dynamic addition to the Holocaust shelves.