RESCUE

Congratulations to the winners from the WORDS ON FIRE and RESISTANCE posts.

TREE G and RAEGAN

Today will be the last giveaway post for a bit, but I do have two posts coming up over the next few days that I think you’ll like, so please do check back in.

For RESCUE, I simply wanted to post an excerpt from the book. Meg is living in Nazi-occupied France, her father is in a German POW camp, and Meg’s family is all secretly part of the resistance movement, so secretly in fact that they don’t necessarily share that information with each other. However, a British Air Force pilot has crash landed in the area and now the Germans are conducting a house to house search for him.

In this excerpt, Meg has a note from her father that she does not want the Germans to find so she has pinned it up into her braids.

To enter to win, I’d love to hear your holiday wish. What would be most exciting to you for the end of the year?

RESCUE EXCERPT

“Search upstairs!” the German ordered.

The extra pins must have fallen to the floor when I cleaned out my room earlier. But footsteps were already pounding up the steps.

I laid flat on my pillow, pulling up the blankets around me.

There, I froze. A shadow blocked the light coming in from my door. One of the Germans must be right in my doorway.

He whispered to someone with him, “Asleep.”

“Then let’s search the other rooms first,” came the reply.

I waited for the shadow to leave, then waited again for sounds of searching in the room beside me. I let my right arm flop over the side of the bed, and there, I felt around the floor until finally, I found a pin. I was just beginning to pull my arm back up when the shadows returned. I had to let my arm dangle again, and the pin dropped back to the floor.

This time, the shadows were accompanied by flashlights that beamed into every corner of my room, ending directly on my face. Then came the order, “Wake up! Schnell, schnell!”

I didn’t need to pretend to be frightened. I popped up straight in bed, my eyes so wide the flashlights hurt them. I pulled the covers up around me and tried to lean closer to the wall. One of my braids was coming loose. If it fell, the note would fall with it.

Two soldiers began a search of my room, and surprisingly, they were polite about it. They didn’t dump anything out or search as closely as I would have expected, which made me think they were looking for something bigger. Such as a British spy, for example.

One of them noticed my braid falling out of the bun. He crouched down on the floor beside me and looked at it. I had to force myself to look at him, so that he wouldn’t see the note. The soldier merely smiled, then picked up the pin I had dropped. He gave it to me without a word, then gestured that I could use it in my hair.

I nodded back and tried to put in the pin, but my hands were still shaking too much to fix it properly, so I knew it did me little good.

When they had finished, they gave me a polite nod, then one of them said in French, “You may go back to sleep. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

They left the room, but downstairs, the search continued. Through my window I saw flashlights in the barn, and I desperately worried that Jakob and I had made some mistake there. It would have been so easy to overlook something.

From downstairs, a voice carried up to my room, one that put a heavy weight on my chest, making it hard to breathe.

“Whose journal is this?” This was Lieutenant Becker, the man I had followed earlier in town.

“That is mine,” Maman said.

No, it was mine. But I was sure it must have burned by now.

“I do not think so, madam. This appears to be a child’s writing.” Maman didn’t answer, so he continued, “I have a few questions for you, and for your mother and daughter as well.”

Maman answered, her voice as calm as Becker’s was sharp. “My mother is an old woman with a failing memory. She won’t remember enough to answer your questions. Ten minutes after you leave, she won’t even remember you were ever here. And my daughter is young and needs her sleep. Perhaps you could speak to her tomorrow.”

“Perhaps we will,” Lieutenant Becker said. “This is the last stop on our searches tonight. Would you be so kind as to put me and my men up for the rest of the night? That will give you and me plenty of time for all the questions I still have, and we would consider it a great service.”

I could almost hear my mother’s heart pounding. Or maybe that was mine, I didn’t know. But I was terrified, for me and my grandmother, for Captain Stewart, and especially for my mother. Because she probably was hiding secrets far more dangerous than anything in my journal.

And I had secrets of my own.

Secrets that could get all of us killed.

THE KING’S ENGLISH (Autographed Copies)

AMAZON

BOOKSHOP.ORG

BARNES & NOBLE