CARRY ME HOME

Author: Sandra Kring ISBN: 9780385338134 8/2008 HISTORICAL FICTION Publisher: BANTAM DELL REISSUE
Time Period: 1940's Wisconsin

The love of family. The heartbreak of war. The triumph of coming home. 1940. Rural Wisconsin. Sixteen-year-old Earl “Earwig” Gunderman is not like other boys his age. Fiercely protected by his older brother, Earwig sees his town and the world around him through the prism of his own unique understanding. He sees his mother’s sadness and his father’s growing solitude. He sees his brother, Jimmy, falling in love with the most beautiful girl in town. And while Earwig is unable to make change for customers at his family’s store, he is singularly well suited to understand what other people in his town cannot: that life as they know it is about to change; the coming war will touch them all. For Jimmy will enlist in the military. And Earwig will watch his parents’ marriage buckle under the strain of a family secret. And when Jimmy returns–a fractured shadow of his former self–it is Earwig’s turn to care for him. His struggles to right the wrongs visited upon his revered older brother by war, women, and life are at once heartwarming and riotously funny. Their family and town irrevocably altered, Earwig and Jimmy fight to find their own places in a world changed forever.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

CARRY ME HOME is a tender WWII tale about a young man who was developmentally arrested by a fever when he was young and the people in his life. Earwig is the narrator of this story, which begins in 1940 when he's sixteen and follows him into the post-war period. He may be "simple" but his thoughts are complex, sensitive and funny as he watches and participates in his rural Wisconsin family and town life.

If you weren't around in the 1940s, this story will open your eyes about what happened on the home front during the war, and how damaged some of the soldiers were when they came home. Earwig views all with compassion and a child's understanding.

This is a truly touching novel, fluid and heartbreaking, yet full of hope that, no matter how difficult today is, a better tomorrow will come. I didn't really buy Earwig as a true-to-life character, but it didn't matter in the least. He does grow and mature but always keeps his love for others. Realistic or not, he's a very special character in a special novel.

Heather Hiestand