Debut author Gavriel Savit's Anna and the Swallow Man opens in Kraków, Poland, in November 1939, when Anna Lania, a "tender, kind, good-hearted girl," is seven years old. Anna and her gregarious Papa are as thick as thieves, at home with many languages and many friends. Readers soon learn, but Anna never finds out, that her father was taken by Germans in Kraków's 1939 purge of intellectuals. While waiting for Papa's return, Anna meets a curious, "more than a little frightening" gentleman--a tall, bespectacled man in a three-piece wool suit--who seems to speak all the languages of the world, even bird. Anna instinctively accepts the "Swallow Man" as her new guardian and the two walk out of Kraków--he in his city finest, she in her shiny red shoes and pretty red-and-white dress--on what will become a years-long, epic journey across war-torn Poland and beyond.
Savit's novel, with its wise, philosophical narrator, has the classic feel and elegant, precise language of a book that's been around forever. Amidst a gripping survival story of brutal cold, hunger and chilling narrow escapes are musings on the power of words and the power of silence, the value of truth and the necessity of lies, the horrors of war, the resilience of people, love, death, the keen intuition of children, living with uncertainty. Stunning. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness