Beyond Paradise

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2 AGO 1999

While the title of this first novel might suggest otherwise, the substance of Hertenstein's story is fairly grim--an American teenager's experience in internment camps in the Philippines during WWII. "How would you like to go to paradise?" asks Louise Keller's father, a Baptist minister who has accepted a position as a missionary on the small island of Panay. Fourteen-year-old Louise, a writer of poetry who chafes at small-town life, is eager for the change. But the new experiences Louise has dreamed of soon turn nightmarish: when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, the war, which had seemed so far away, rapidly threatens their island existence. Separated from her father, burdened with her seriously depressed mother, Louise first joins the missionaries in a makeshift camp in the jungle to hide from the invading Japanese, but they are soon captured and sent to internment camps. Louise's narration rarely sounds like a teenager's, and the prose feels overwritten in spots. And by covering such a large swath of time and introducing so many secondary characters, Hertenstein sacrifices depth for breadth; the few superficial moments of character development she grants Louise (the discovery of her grandmother's suicide; her revelation that the Japanese are human, too) feel unconnected and unconvincing. But while the story is not especially moving, it has value as an introduction to a little-known slice of American history. Ages 12-up.