This is one war memoir you have to read.  Margaret Blair has achieved an impeccably written, powerful and moving account of a sad chapter in history, told through the eyes of a child but with a discreet adult sensibility supplying the necessary information to understand fully what the child is going through. …
She lives in an incomprehensible present, unable to understand, for example, her increasing lack of energy (as the inmates’ calorie count was cut to 300 a day) but clinging with desperate affection to the stuffed toy she brought with her from her pampered other life.  You will be touched, as I was, by the threadbare blue giraffe that becomes the metaphor of her lost childhood.

Betty Jane Wylie, O.C. award-winning author of Beginnings: A Book for Widows, and past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada