Bombs on Aunt Dainty

A teenager in the Second World War, Anna’s life is hard enough. Money is scarce and Anna’s beloved family is classified as enemy aliens. That makes getting jobs an incredibly hard trial. So when Anna’s mother loses her job, life is just a matter of Anna coming home from her art classes and her mother telling her, before she even had the chance to ask ‘not this time’. In this collection of thoughtfully written sentences, I wondered whether Anna will ever lead a proper teenage love life, as there is a lot of description of the air raid sirens and food rationing. In the end Anna falls in love with her drawing teacher, John Cotmore. Personally I think that there could have been more time allocated to this section of Anna’s refugee life, after all, this is really the only part of the young teenagers life that is normal. It is funny how Anna and her older brother Max don’t express much fear at the air raids, only in one particular one. Bombs On Aunt Dainty is a sequel to When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, the first book in the series by Judith Kerr.  Judith Kerr has also written the book The Tiger Who Came to Tea and is still alive after living through the Second World War, fascinating!

Learn more about Judith Kerr from Wikipedia