The Boon family and their indefatigable gallows humor are back in Benny Lindelauf's follow-up to Nine Open Arms. Poised to win a scholarship to the nearby teachers college, Fing has high hopes. It's 1938 and her poor family of nine-one father, four brothers, three sisters, and a grandmother-has finally managed to eke out a living in the tiny cigar factory abutting their dilapidated home. But smelling success, her dreamer of a father is determined to expand and Fing's dreams fall apart when she instead has to go to work for the Cigar Emperor, taking care of his new, German wife's eccentric niece. The novel's gripping language, enriched by Yiddish, German, and Dutch dialect, plunges the reader into the world of a large, colorful, motherless family as they navigate the changes World War II visits upon their little town on the border of the Netherlands and Germany. This stand-alone follow-up to Nine Open Arms, a 2015 Batchelder Honor book translated from Dutch, is a fantasy, a historical novel, and literary fiction all wrapped into one.

 

There are 376 pages in this book. This book was published 2019 by Enchanted Lion Books .

Jill Esbaum is the award-winning author of many picture books and also writes a variety of non-fiction books for National Geographic lfids. Dasha Tolstikova is an illustrator whose work has appeared in The New York limes, Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. Benny Lindelauf is a multi-award-winning Dutch children's book author whose books have been translated into six languages. He also teaches creative writing to adults and children. Ludwig Volbeda (1990), is a Dutch illustrator based in Amsterdam. Tortot, the Cold Fish Who Lost His World and Found His Heart is the first children's book he has illustrated and it won a nomination for the BoekenPauw prize for best illustrated children's book.