Searching for Eternity
by Elizabeth Musser
The book starts on January 29, 1983. Emile de Bonnery is alone, eating leftover pizza and watching the news. A story comes on about the arrest of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, and he stops dead in his tracks. His hand automatically reaches for the phone to call his mother, who is also watching the story. Emile’s one desire is that now they’ll know some answers. As his mind goes over all the implications of the capture of Barbie, it goes back to the day when he had to leave France, the only country he’d ever known. Emile knows that it is time to write his story so he puts a piece of paper into his type writer and the readers are carried back in time.
The author makes use of a lot of time shifting. He starts the book back in the 1980s but when he has Emile write his story the readers are taken back to a time when Emile was about to turn 14. As he tells the story he remembers back to earlier times when his father was still at home. So he jumps around a lot.
Emile is forced to move to the United States because of his father. He had ordered his mom to take him and move back to the United States, where she’d grown up, because he felt the family was in danger. The story is complicated but as Emile’s father grew up he was in the French Resistance. Part of Emile thinks that he never gave it up and that it’s because his father is a spy that they have to move.
Emile has a hard time adjusting to life in America. His accent makes him a target for all the bullies. He’s thrown into classes he doesn’t understand. The church his grandmother attends is very different from the one his French grandmother took him to. At lunch time he ends up sitting down across from a girl who was sitting by herself. Her name is Eternity. As Emile gets to know Eternity he finds out that she basically takes care of her little sister and brother because her mother spends her days drinking. To protect her siblings Eternity has created a safe haven in their trailer. She put a big lock on the door of one of the rooms and the children retreat there any time they’re home. It is one of the few things that Eternity has control over.
The author weaves together Emile’s life in the United States and his relationship with Eternity, with what happened in the past of both them. She uses these characters to give the readers a sense of what happened during World War II and how deeply it effected all involved even to the next generations. And she includes the real historical figure, Klaus Barbie, to deepen that understanding. Horrible things happened during that war that are impossible to understand unless you were there and experienced it. This book does give the reader a deeper understanding as descriptions of actual types of torture are included. Because of this it might be better to limit reading of this book to teens and up. It is not easy reading what happened to these innocent people knowing that although these characters are fictitious, real human beings were tortured in this way.
Given those restrictions I do highly recommend this book.
Reviewed by Lynn Worley
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