Castles Burning

I begged and often my brother obliged. In the dark of night when I couldn''t sleep Ivan told me fairy tales in a whisper. All the stories began in the traditional Hungarian manner `Once there was / where there wasn''t / there was once a Castle / that twirled on the foot of a duck.''There are few female figures in literature as riveting as the precocious nine-year-old Magda Denes who narrates this story. Her stubborn self-command and irrepressible awareness of the absurd make her in her mother''s eyes impossibly sarcastic bigmouthed insolent and far too smart for her own good. When her family goes into hiding from the fascist Arrow-Cross she is torn from the castle of intimacies shared with her adored and adoring older brother and plunged into a world of incomprehensible deprivation separation and loss. Her rage and her ability to feel devastating sorrow and still insist on life will reach every reader at the core.