WHAT DOES IT MEAN if the fourteen year old daughter in an affectionate, loyal, and at least “three-quarter’s cultured” family has bad dreams about the Gestapo?  This is memoir—not fiction—about a wartime Christmas in Duluth. Young Carol has two weeks home from boarding school in the East. Her mother has been dead two years, and two of her three brothers are away at war. Recalling her own adolescent thinking, and thinking of what adolescents experience now, Carol Bly comes to some astonishing conclusions.

“What a lovely essay this is! It has an uncanny power to transport the reader to 1944, U-boats circling in black waters, half a family overseas, the Christmas dance. But best of all is the portrait of a father who praises shabbiness while he practices honor and reserve.”  —Bill Holm