HARBORING HOPE

A story highlighting elements of Denmark’s role in the Second World War, with an inspiring young hero at its center.

Denmark is one of the few countries with a World War II record to be proud of—according to the book, 7,742 of the country’s 8,250 Jews survived with the brave assistance of non-Jewish citizens—so Hood’s choice to focus on the rare uplifting story from this period is a sound one. Twenty-two-year-old Henny Sinding, the daughter of a naval officer, helped smuggle hundreds of Jews to safety in Sweden on the Gerda III, a boat that was originally used to maintain buoys and lighthouses. Hood tells us that “people later compared Henny to / Pippi Longstocking, / the playful, / unconventional, / compassionate, / ‘strongest girl in the world,’ ” and also that “like the Little Mermaid, / Henny discovered / that being human can be painful.” But these intriguing insights are not centered, rather smothered by hundreds of pages that slowly unfold, tracing the Danish role in the war and sometimes reading like children’s encyclopedia entries with line breaks. And if the line breaks are intended to help reluctant readers by putting fewer words on each page, the vocabulary and sentence construction used often work against accessibility and comprehension. The book is very long, and it is neither lively nor lyrical.

A bit of a slog for the target audience.