Catherine Chidgey. (2018). The Wish Child: A Novel. Catapult.

Catherine Chidgey. 2018. The Wish Child: A Novel. Catapult.

Catherine Chidgey, The Wish Child: A Novel. Catapult, 2018.

Catherine Chidgey. The Wish Child: A Novel. Catapult, 2018.

OverDrive Product Record

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The Wish Child

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1. • value: family
2. • value: Nazis
3. • value: World War II
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5. • value: Historical
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8. • value: Adolf Hitler
9. • value: Coming of age
10. • value: ww2
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14. • value: nazi germany
15. • value: grief
16. • value: World War 2
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24. • value: world war 2 books
25. • value: world war ii books
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30. • value: ww2 history
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32. • value: realistic fiction books
33. • value: books fiction
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Chidgey, Catherine
   • bioText: Catherine Chidgey's debut novel, In a Fishbone Church, won the Betty Trask Prize, Best First Book in the CommonwealthWriters’ Prize (South East Asia and Pacific Region), and was long–listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, The Strength of the Sun, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Sunday Express (UK) called her third novel, The Transformation, “a highly original read, as beautiful as it is terrifying.” Chidgey is the recipient of the 2017 Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and lives in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand.
   • name: Catherine Chidgey

imprint

Counterpoint

publishDate

2018-10-02T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Wish Child

fullDescription

International Bestseller

Two children and a mysterious narrator navigate the falsehoods and wreckage of Hitler’s Germany in this stunning WW2 historical fiction novel for fans of The Book Thief.
Germany, 1939. As Germany’s hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, two children, Sieglinde and Erich, find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city, people are talking of surrender. The days Sieglinde and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives.
Watching over them is the wish child, the enigmatic narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the ruins of a nation’s dream.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist (starred review)
   • content: "Fiction based on fact can bring to life a place and time as no mere history can--in this case, Germany from 1939 to 1997, concentrating on the war years . . . This beautifully written, vivid picture of one of the darkest times in human history, already an international best-seller, also may serve as a cautionary tale for today."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "The contrast of voices provides a detailed portrait of Siggi and Erich's fractured lives. Fans of The Book Thief will enjoy Chidgey's delicate and elegant novel."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Historical Novel Society
   • content: "This is an absorbing story, intelligent and literary."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Times (London)
   • content: "A remarkable book with a stunningly original twist."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Judge's Report, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
   • content: "Catherine Chidgey's The Wish Child subtly examines territory unusual for a New Zealand writer with this original exploration of the edges of a much-written-about historic time. Exposing and celebrating the power of words--so dangerous they must be cut out or shredded, so magical they can be wondered at and conjured with--Chidgey also exposes the fragility and strength of humanity. Elegantly written, there is an innerness to the book's narrative which gives it authenticity and even authority. The fey, mysterious voice of the Wish Child, and the very human voices and activities of the book's other children, are compelling and memorable. You'll be caught by surprise with its plumbing of depths and sudden moments of grace, beauty and light."
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from August 1, 2018
     The spectral voice of a wistful, mysterious narrator conveys not only the plot, but also the elegiac tone of this chronicle of the acute and lingering damages wrought by blind adherence to ideology.Chidgey (The Transformation, 2006, etc.), winner of New Zealand's Acorn Foundation Fiction prize for this work, slowly unspools the parallel stories of two children growing up in Germany as Hitler's wartime grip becomes a stranglehold. Siggi is the daughter of a comfortable middle-class family in Berlin. Her father works as a government censor redacting words like "freedom" and "defeat" from books and newspapers. "I make things safe," he tells young Siggi. Erich, a dreamy child with the perfect "German face," is being raised on a farm near Leipzig by nationalistic parents who censor their family's past. As war's relentless devastation mounts in both children's homes, their worlds become increasingly more surreal, and an element of magical realism surrounds their stories. Their lives briefly entwine during the war in an intense struggle for survival, but they are soon traumatically separated. In adult life, Siggi searches for clues to Erich's post-Cold War whereabouts, while her career as a "puzzler"--a specialist responsible for restoring documents destroyed by the Stasi before the fall of the Berlin Wall--inversely echoes her father's wartime responsibilities. Chidgey's understated and poetic revelations of the banalities of day-to-day life under siege, as the German war effort fails, communicate the corrosive horrors of war with an unrelenting catalog of loss and diminution, leavened only by an occasional dialogue between two hausfraus--fraus Müller and Miller-- who vie for moral superiority while spouting malapropisms and vapid, occasionally appalling, protestations of loyalty.Chidgey's controlled revelation of the identity of her shadowy narrator gradually illuminates the true horrors endured by the rest of the characters in this devastating work.

     COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 20, 2018
     This inventive historical from Chidgey (The Strength of the Sun) begins in 1995 with elderly Sieglinde, who goes by “Siggi,” working on a puzzle: reconstructing stories from the lives of Germans during WWII through letters intercepted by the Nazis. In doing so, she begins to recollect her life in 1939 Berlin, where her middle-class family toes the Nazi line under the direction of her father, a government censor. Back then, on a farm near Leipzig, young Erich Kröning is growing up with less privilege but a great sense of peace as he spends his days tending to bees. Firmly entrenched in Nazi ideology, both families believe the Führer has their best interests in mind despite the escalating war. As the war rages on, the Allied forces close in, and Siggi and Erich are forced into the center of Berlin. Meeting in the bombarded city, they must work together if they hope to survive and set up camp in an abandoned theater. The story is told through multiple viewpoints, with one perspective, “the wish child,” hovering omnisciently over Siggi and Erich’s journey and propelling the story—and Germany as a whole—toward closure after the horrific war. Although the narrative-switching creates a distance, the contrast of voices provides a detailed portrait of Siggi and Erich’s fractured lives. Fans of The Book Thief will enjoy Chidgey’s delicate and elegant novel.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 1, 2018
     Fiction based on fact can bring to life a place and time as no mere history can?in this case, Germany from 1939 to 1997, concentrating on the war years. Chidgey follows the lives of two couples and their families, Emilie and Cristoph Kroning on a farm near Leipzig, and Brigette and Gottlieb Heilmann with children Sieglinde, Jurgen, and Kurt in Berlin. In 1939, the Kronings successfully petition the government for the mercy killing of their severely disabled son; later, they adopt a Polish orphan, Erich, who is found to have the perfect German face. While Cristoph goes off to war, Gottlieb works as a government censor, razoring out prohibited words as the government gradually takes, first, material goods and then less-tangible but equally dear things from its people. In chorus-like fashion, dialogue between the Fraus Miller and Muller (one of them always right, the other never wrong) chronicles the breakdown of German society. The narrator who watches it all is the wish child, whose identity is finally made clear. Prizewinning New Zealand author Chidgey (The Strength of the Sun, 2002) lived in Germany for three years (where Margaret Atwood also lived while writing The Handmaid's Tale). This beautifully written, vivid picture of one of the darkest times in human history, already an international best-seller, also may serve as a cautionary tale for today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from August 1, 2018
     The spectral voice of a wistful, mysterious narrator conveys not only the plot, but also the elegiac tone of this chronicle of the acute and lingering damages wrought by blind adherence to ideology.Chidgey (The Transformation, 2006, etc.), winner of New Zealand's Acorn Foundation Fiction prize for this work, slowly unspools the parallel stories of two children growing up in Germany as Hitler's wartime grip becomes a stranglehold. Siggi is the daughter of a comfortable middle-class family in Berlin. Her father works as a government censor redacting words like "freedom" and "defeat" from books and newspapers. "I make things safe," he tells young Siggi. Erich, a dreamy child with the perfect "German face," is being raised on a farm near Leipzig by nationalistic parents who censor their family's past. As war's relentless devastation mounts in both children's homes, their worlds become increasingly more surreal, and an element of magical realism surrounds their stories. Their lives briefly entwine during the war in an intense struggle for survival, but they are soon traumatically separated. In adult life, Siggi searches for clues to Erich's post-Cold War whereabouts, while her career as a "puzzler"--a specialist responsible for restoring documents destroyed by the Stasi before the fall of the Berlin Wall--inversely echoes her father's wartime responsibilities. Chidgey's understated and poetic revelations of the banalities of day-to-day life under siege, as the German war effort fails, communicate the corrosive horrors of war with an unrelenting catalog of loss and diminution, leavened only by an occasional dialogue between two hausfraus--fraus M�ller and Miller-- who vie for moral superiority while spouting malapropisms and vapid, occasionally appalling, protestations of loyalty.Chidgey's controlled revelation of the identity of her shadowy narrator gradually illuminates the true horrors endured by the rest of the characters in this devastating work.

     COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

0

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International Bestseller

Two children and a mysterious narrator navigate the falsehoods and wreckage of Hitler’s Germany in this stunning WW2 historical fiction novel for fans of The Book Thief.
Germany, 1939. As Germany’s hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, two children, Sieglinde and Erich, find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city, people are talking of surrender. The days Sieglinde and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives.
Watching over them is the wish child, the enigmatic narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the ruins of a nation’s dream.

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tableOfContents

Puzzles
Strength Through Joy
Führer Weather
The Wax Woman
The Ger man Face
You Too Belong to the Führer
The Shadowman
A Puppet Show
Alchemy
Kinder toten lieder
Persilscheine
The Wish Child
Er Ich
The Secret That Is Not a Secret
Historical Note
Note on Sources
Acknowledgements

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC043000
   • description: Fiction / Coming of Age
2. • code: FIC014050
   • description: FICTION / Historical / 20th Century / World War II & Holocaust
3. • code: FIC071000
   • description: Fiction / Friendship