What was Anne Frank like before she started her famous diary? How did she get along with her sister, her mother, and the changing world around her? When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary by Alice Hoffman (Scholastic, 2024) is intended to give us a glimpse into this real girl in the years before she must go into hiding. Unfortunately, while the setting was Amsterdam and the prose was thoughtful, no distinct voices stood out. Characters, people, and places were described in ponderously long paragraphs, not through the young voice of a young tweenager.
My Issues with When We Flew Away
Despite Alice Hoffman’s long list of award-winning books, she missed the boat here. She has done the complete opposite of “show, don’t tell.” No, in When We Flew Away, there is very little showing. Beginning with just about 3-5 pages of dialogue and movement, we then are forced to read about 20 pages of description of what has brought young Anne and Margot to that moment walking down the street. A few interjections of dialogue infers that this is all happening in a moment, but it’s not: it’s just describing. And on and on. That is the first chapter!
The omniscient narrator is what ruined this book for me. Instead of the delightful first person voice that Anne gives in her personal diary, this is a narrator that not only knows what will happen but knows exactly how Anne’s family will get there, and wants us, who also know, to see the connections of it all.
I get that writing with Anne’s first-person narration might not have been appropriate. Anne was a real child and writing this novel as if she had written it would have been going too far. This is NOT her true diary, and we do know where she is headed. But I feel like the hopeful child’s perspective could have come across better with a more child-like perspective and a less omniscient narrator. The entire time I was reading I wished there was more action within the thoughts and commentary rather than somber thinking. The action could have conveyed the feeling and thinking. There was so much opportunity lost in the lengthy paragraphs of background information.
As the book progresses, we read paragraph descriptions of what they are thinking about the events and how they feel about each other. But it’s not just Anne’s thoughts. The omniscient narrator, who knows where Anne is headed, adds in a paragraph every now and then with Anne’s mother’s impressions, her father’s decisions, and even Margot’s. Phrases suggesting “would never get to do” and “last time but didn’t know it” seemed to echo in the lengthy proses paragraphs throughout the book.
How When We Flew Away is Set Up
The sections of When We Flew Away are thoughtful divisions of the story of the years approaching the Frank’s going into hiding. These were: “Little Sister” (May 1940); “The Wolf” (May 1940-September 1940); “Unspoken” (December 1940-May 1941); “The World and the Underworld” (June 1941-February 1942); and “Hour of Darkness, Hour of Light” (February 1942-July 1942). Each of these sections begins with a page summarizing something about the sisters’ relationship with the world. Each section ends with a page titled “What We Lost” that depicts what people felt at the moment in time, at that turning point. The last section ends with “What We Will Remember.”
It is a touching outline of the Frank families’ time during the two years prior to hiding. Not only that, but the author has carefully studied the progress of the war and the increasing restrictions in Holland. We get glimpses of what it may have been like in Holland in that time. I like how the themed sections have been set up. She gives the foreboding sense of doom a small frame of hope.
Further, the flying in the title is echoed in the images of birds and moths that Anne sees (or does she?). A bird seems to nest outside her window until the day she notices the birds are quieter and her bird has flown away. Anne feels like there are moths hovering about, which seems an appropriate shadow of the scariness encroaching on the world of the Jews. The moths increase as the book progresses. Even more so, Anne frequently dreams of flying away from her situation, flying away into her daydreams.
Hopeful Before Her Diary
The dust jacket suggests that this is a book of Anne coming to know herself and what she wants and who she wants to become. I wish I could agree. In some respects, I guess this book does that. By the beginning of her real diary, she knows she wants to be a writer. Did this book lead up to that?
Instead of showing Anne developing a confident voice, this middle grade novel felt, instead, like a book of “past perfect” phrases. “They had done this. They had done that. They had hoped.” I wanted more straight-forward past tense phrases. “They sat down. They talked. They dreamed.” Was this “past perfect” tense intentional? Does this sentence structure give it an intentional sense of finality, that there was no hope, no changing what was coming? Or, rather, what has already happened?
For me, this sentence structure did not work. The book felt incredibly passive. It lacked any action to drive a hopeful narrative forward. True, this all has happened. And we knew it would. But this is supposed to be a children’s middle grade novel. In a novel about life before hiding, before the horrors of Auschwitz, we need a book with hope and action that helps introduce the live-changing girl that was Anne Frank. Her true voice in her personal diary is more hopeful than any other. I wish I heard her and saw her in Alice Hoffman’s novel about her tweenaged years.
