Wow! I expected fantastic things after reading The Good Master and A Tree for Peter, but I didn't really expect this. Seredy's illustrations, as always, are gorgeous.īoth The Good Master and The Singing Tree are Newbery Honor books. Overall it's a worthwhile middle grade-level story, a strong sequel to The Good Master, and an interesting, different POV about the effects of WWI on the people left behind when soldiers go off to war, and how those soldiers are changed by their experiences. About lone dogs guarding ruins of homes, and of cats waiting for a door to open that had no walls around it.There's quite a bit of narrative editorializing about the depredations of war, and I get the impression Kate Seredy was quite the peacenik and had strong opinions about America staying out of WWII (this book was written in 1939 it would be interesting to know if her opinions had changed at all five or six years later). He spoke of the small bird with the broken wing one of the men had picked up, and how the little bird had become tame during the weeks its wing was healing how they had let it go on a September morning and how it sang to them before it soared away. Once in a while he told small, poignant stories, but there were no cannon belching death or wounded screaming for mercy in the memories he shared with his family. Father never spoke of the war and soon they all learned not to ask about it, because then his face would darken as if he were in pain. I found much more to love this time around: there are more of the lovely stories of country life in Hungary in the early 1900's than I had remembered (the first third of the book is pre-war), and the wartime stories are more touching. I decided I needed to read it again to give it a more fair assessment.

My reaction to this book as a teenager was 'meh' I didn't care for the more serious tone of this book.

In The Singing Tree, Kate's and Jansci's fathers go off to war (WWI), and the two cousins, who are now teenagers, take care of the family farm in the Hungarian steppes, as well as their grandparents, some neighbors who need a place to stay, six Russian POWs, and six German children who are refugees.

This 1939 Newbery Honor book is a sequel to The Good Master, one of my childhood favorites, about two cousins and their wonderful adventures in the Hungarian countryside in the early part of the 1900s.

The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy