In particular, I recommend that conservative parents of young and/or sensitive children read on. I hate to spoil books in reviews, but this one requires a careful look, and to do that, I must give away some key details. It has a number of hard themes and some challenging content. Readers must note that this book is quite different from van Stockum’s other stories.

But, in classic van Stockum style, the darkness of Janna’s pain is overwhelmed by light. As she discerns the answer to that burning question, all of her prejudices, hopes, and understandings of the world are turned on their head, leaving Janna confused and feeling adrift. When Janna is sent to live with her parents in German occupied Holland, her hopes of normal happy family life are quickly dashed, and she is left wondering where she really fits in the world. All Janna can dream about is being reunited with her parents and being the kind of family we expect to see in a van Stockum novel. In The Borrowed House, however, German Hitler Youth, Janna, is displaced from her family, and living on a German farm away from her parents. In most of Hilda van Stockum’s books, the main character of the story is the ordinary happy family. Hilda Van Stockum writes as vividly, as revealingly, of the wartime Dutch scene from the German point of view as she did in her acclaimed 1962 novel about a Dutch family, The Winged Watchman. Janna explores the house-find among other things a ring, a family portrait, a closetful of clothes for a girl her age-and begins to wonder about the Dutch family, the van Arkels, who had been so abruptly evicted when their home was requisitioned for Janna's parents.Īs she learns more about the van Arkels and comes to know the servants they left behind, her Dutch tutor-and finally, the attractive, mysterious Sef-Janna finds her new knowledge of the Dutch disturblingly at odds with what the Hitler Youth organization has instilled in her. Reunited with her parents after a long, wartime separation, twelve-year-old Janna moves gratefully into the Amsterdam house'borrowed' for her mother and father, an eminent German couple who have come from Berlin to perform for the Nazi occupation forces.

The Borrowed House by Hilda van Stockum