Speaking to us with amazingly spare and poetic insight, and a voice totally devoid of self-consciousness, Lulu begins to spin the story of her young life. With her family, Dutch expatriots, on the lush, tropical island of Java, her father a quiet, preoccupied doctor, her mother a selfish, unfulfilled writer, as aunt she adores and a wayward uncle, Lulu shares the secrets and magic of her childhood world.

This world is shattered, however, when her family is urgently called back to Holland. As they voyage first by boat and then by train through Italy and Paris, Lulu, innocent until now that she is Jewish, is awakened for the first time to the dark, yet still undefined menace, of pre-World War II Europe. Here mother leaves for the safety of London with her baby brother. Lulu and her father stay in the Hague, and are eventually forced into hiding in the attic of a sympathetic shopkeeper, who risks her life to save them. All the while, everything we learn is filtered through the rich and generates imagination of young Lulu.

A moving, literary tour-life-force.