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Sep 01, 2010vickiz rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Author Alison Pick was inspired by her grandparents' own arduous five-year exodus from Czechoslovakia to Canada during World War II in constructing the story of the flight of the Bauer family from the encroaching Nazi occupation. She couples down to earth, propulsive description with occasional flourishes of the cinematic, all interwoven with the deft and poignant use of literal and symbolic images. Trains, which bookend both the story of the Bauers and the voice of the book's modern day narrator, are a powerful case in point. Young son Pepik's toy train set interconnects the Bauer home, is a source of both distraction and solace for him and his family, and is a reminder of his absence when his parents secure him a place on a Kindertransport, part of a series of trains used to rescue children from Nazi occupied territories to be placed with families in the United Kingdom until and if the children could be reunited with their parents after the war. Arrivals and departures on train platforms, especially Pepik's dramatic departure, are on one hand like typically dramatic movie scenes, but Pick underpins them with the earthy sights, sounds and smells of desperate, frightened human beings. Throughout, she invests images like this with both thematic potency and realistic dramatic resonance. The voice of the present-day narrator in Far To Go - wounded but resilient - is a reassuring and steadfast guide to the conclusion of this riveting story of a family torn asunder, then reassembled in a perhaps somewhat surprising fashion. The voice is wary, damaged, almost resigned, but the note of contentment at the end suggests a faith not entirely extinguished by the cruelties of history. This is a journey and a voice worth following to an unexpectedly redemptive resolution. Even the green-tinged tones of the cover convey a hopefulness that builds with a subtle momentum over the course of this absorbing book.