Home. “It’s where we always come back to… where we’re from.”
Can Anna depend on her curiosity, independence, and intuition help her find another when she has to leave the place she’s “spent [her] life connected to?...Where will home be now?”
Can her mushroom-foraging skills ensure her survival in getting there? Her knowledge of the natural world? What can she rely on to get her secrets-stuffed copy of Wuthering Heights to the German post during World War II?
A story of one family’s struggle with forced migration, Maria Kiely’s Which Way Is Home promises, it turns out, that if we pay attention, we can rely on ourselves—and on kind strangers.
Daughter, sister, cousin, gymnast Anna has everything: her family, faith, a farm with lambs, geese, and a loyal dog. But, she must leave it all behind when “everything was changing with the Communist takeover” in her beloved Czechoslovakia. Yes, she is afraid and lost. Still, on foot, by train, she must travel to the safety of the Austrian Alps.
There are many, many gifts in this based-on-truth story, such as the setting of war against the vast backdrop of peaceful nature, the intuitiveness with which Anna knows who she can trust. The details—strawberries, cabbage soup, chewing gum—are intentional and meaningful. And the theme is more significant than ever to young readers these days: Anna wonders if it’s better to “savor our dreams” and try to hold onto home, or to let it go? Is it possible to being okay if you have to start over?
Moving in both pace and emotion, Which Way Is Home is that masterful balance between history and imagination, forty-one chapters of discovering how to find “that special spot.”