Mary McKay Maynard

The author, an American, was a child living with her parents in a mining camp in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. Rather than surrender to the enemy and be interned, Mary McKay Maynard's family and many of the other occupants of the mining camp chose to go into hiding in the jungle. They treated it as a camping trip and figured they would only need to last a few weeks until the US forces came and rescued them. Their "camping trip" wound up lasting several years.

Maynard does a good job of giving the reader a clear sense of what's going on, without doing information dumps and while still maintaining her perspective a child. She portrays the various characters in the narrative very well. There are a lot of strong, resourceful people in the story and a few scoundrels, but nobody that's rotten to the core or 100% noble and heroic. The Americans' relationships with the Filipino locals were touching; they could never have survived so long in hiding without extensive help from the local population.

At regular intervals throughout the book, Maynard includes passages from the diary her mother kept while they were in hiding. From what I read, I think that diary ought to be published. Mary's mother was an extremely gifted writer who was not only very observant, but turned out poetic, beautiful phrasing. I'd love to read the whole thing.

I hadn't known very much about the Pacific Theater of World War II, never mind daily life in Japanese-occupied countries, and I learned a lot from this book. It made me want to know more.… (altro)

A very well-written book of an American family that survived two years of hiding in a Philippine jungle during WWII. The author who was eight years old at the time of their flight tells the story now many years later interlacing her memories with entries from her mother's diaries. With her father being manager of a gold mine on Mindanao, the family before the war was able to live a privileged lifestyle with servants to attend to all their needs. Life in the jungle was difficult, but through luck, intelligent choices and grit, they were able to evade the Japanese and eat and live far better than their counterparts in Japanese internment camps. Throughout the book is the anxious thought of a son left in a boarding school in northern Luzon--no word came of his fate until after the family had returned to the United States in 1944. In November of 1943 with the help of guerillas led by Col. Fertig, the family was the first evacuation by submarine to include female civilians. The diaries of her mother show a poetic flair as she describes the flora and fauna of the jungle and I wish more of them had been included. Another remarkable story to add to the WWII collection.… (altro)