CAPTAIN'S COMMAND

Myers (Ethan Between Us, 1998, etc.) takes on WWII and the folks on the Oklahoma home front. Gail knows that everything has changed when the telegram arrives stating that her father is missing in action. Although everyone in their small town, including Gail’s grandmother and her blind and bitter Uncle Ned, believe that her father is dead, Gail and her mother refuse to give up hope. Christmas is coming, and Gail wants her twin younger siblings to hope, too. Alternating with Gail’s story at home is the story of a navigator and a gunner who survive the crash of their plane. The gunner drags the navigator to safety where they are protected by French members of the Resistance; the navigator dies, while the gunner makes his way at last to England. Meanwhile, Gail learns more about her family, and how Ned’s blindness and his wife’s leaving have twisted him; he even attacks Captain, Gail’s golden retriever. The story doesn’t have the natural flow of some of Myers’s other novels; the reconciliations are mechanical (and plentiful), while the plot twists are rather heavyhanded: Christmas revelations, rescues, kindnesses, and sorrows. Despite such tampering, what remains vivid is the girl, her dog, and life on the home front, when the war came over the radio. (Fiction. 10-12)