![]() In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). ![]() ![]() The girl, of course, knows nothing about this - at the time. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.” Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert - in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. This is definitely the case with Dinah Brooke’s 1974 novel The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. Sometimes the story around a book is even better than the book itself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |