MOLLY’S FIRE

The daughter of a WWII fighter pilot is the only one who refuses to believe that he has been killed when his plane is shot down over Holland. Molly lives a perfectly normal life in a small fishing town in Maine until her father enlists in the air force, disrupting their heretofore routine lives. The 13-year-old adores her father, with whom she has always had an especially close relationship. Father and daughter even have a special place to which they often go to talk—the ruins of an old church on a cliff by the sea. Molly’s fears are realized when the dreaded telegram comes—plane shot down; pilot presumed dead. Despite her family’s attempt to get Molly to accept what appears to be the truth, Molly steadfastly refuses to believe that her father is dead. Throughout the novel, Molly works on a project of excavating a stained glass window whose pieces are buried in the old churchyard with the goal of reconstructing it as a Christmas present for the father she is firmly convinced will return. She also watches her mother, now presumably a widow, become involved with the father of the school bully. During the course of the story Molly befriends the rich boy in town and also becomes friends with a half-Asian classmate, who is quickly relegated to the role of scapegoat by insensitive students and townspeople. Unfortunately, the writing tends towards the pedestrian, and many of the characters are straight out of central casting—the poor misunderstood rich boy, the token Jew whose family is caught up in the Holocaust, and the brave, noble, and unfairly treated Asian-American. A well-meaning but so-so story burdened with an ending that’s awfully hard to buy. (Fiction. 9-14)