Whitcoulls Recommends: Buckeye and Saving Elli

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. This is set in a small Ohio town at the very end of WW2 when two people become caught up in victory celebrations and have a brief romantic encounter, which results in complications which haunt them down through generations. As secrets are exposed some people find that things are not what they had seemed, and that the world they thought they knew was in fact a lie. I loved this book. 

Saving Elli by Doug Gold. In Nazi occupied Amsterdam, near Anne Frank's house, another Jewish girl was hidden. Her name was Elli. Her father was executed at Mauthausen concentration camp and her mother fled for her life. To save Elli, Resistance couple Frits and Jo Hakkens risked everything, concealing her in a secret space above the ceiling. With shrewd cunning and unflinching courage, they outwitted the Gestapo, survived relentless searches and faced betrayal from those they once trusted. This is an extraordinary story which has a New Zealand connection. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talks'b.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Joan mackenzie, Good morning, Good morning. Okay, we're going to
start with a book from Patrick Ryan. Yes, I had
not heard of him before, but he's written a book
called Buckeye, which I just adored. It's a gentle, quiet
little book about families and the secrets within families. It's
set in the state of Ohio, where I believe that
the plant the buckeye, is a state symbol for Raio

(00:35):
and that's where the title of the book comes from.
And one of the characters has this as their nickname.
And it begins right at the end of the Second
World War when everybody's out on the street celebrating victory
and two people who are complete strangers get caught up
in the moment and have a very brief romantic encounter,
which then has ramifications all the way down through future generations.

(00:56):
So you're in a very small town where there are
families with secrets, and as those secrets are gradually unfolded
over time, things are revealed to people who find that
the world that they thought they knew is actually quite
different from what they had previously understood, and it goes.
It's not an epic book in the scale that some
big fat books are, but it does travel through generation

(01:17):
so that by the end of the book we're in
the sixties and the Vietnam Wars going on, and a
couple of the kids who are descendants from the original
couple find that they're going to be caught up to
the draft or I do love small towns and all
its secrets.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Good.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
You know, you can't know everything about everyone, but you
don't really, you know. We're sticking with a bit of
a theme today. You've got another book for us which
is also sort of set during World War II. It's
called Saving Ali by Doug Gold.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
It's Doug Gold's and his Zealand writer. This is his
third book. I think he came to prominence with the
first one, which was called The Note through the Wire,
which was based on his wife's family's experiences during the war. Well,
this one has characters who are not related to him,
but he's found an extraordinary World War story which has
resonance of Anne Frank. I guess it's the story of

(02:05):
a Jewish family living in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation
and the father, Abraham, is taken away to a camp
from which he never returns, and the mother eventually realizes
that her only hope of survival is to abandon her
two children and leave. And I don't pass judgment on that,
because what an extraordinarily tough decision. But she one of

(02:25):
the two children was a daughter called Ali, and there
were a resistance couple who took Ali, who I think
was about the age of two, into their house. They
hid her in the ceiling, they found ways to keep
her from the German authorities. And it's an extraordinary story
of the bravery of these people set against the brutality
of what was going on in Amsterdam during that time.

(02:46):
And there is a New Zealand connection some generations later.
Towards the end of the book, there is a reunion
of some of these characters here in New Zealand.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Okay, so is this fictional nonfiction?

Speaker 3 (02:58):
That's nonfiction?

Speaker 2 (02:58):
It's nonfiction, Okay, true.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Doug God's done some extraordinary research and found the story
of this little girl who was taken in by people
who brought her up as their own for as long
as they possibly could.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Thank you so much, Joan, that sounds very moving. Those
two books, Saving Allie by Doug Gold, and the first
book that Joan spoke about was Patrick Ryan with Buckeye.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio