The Vanishing Sky

April 27, 2020
Binder’s debut novel (after the collection Rise) follows Etta and Josef Huber and their sons Max and Georg in rural Germany during WWII. Before Georg, a bookish 15-year-old, is sent to a Hitler Youth academy, he secretly watches a Roma camp by the river, hoping in vain that the women’s dancing will spark the socially acceptable carnal desire for the opposite sex that he knows his strict and punitive father expects of him. (Meanwhile, Georg would rather be studying Greek and Latin than join with the fascists.) Binder then alternates between Georg’s life at the academy, where he sees the damage suffered by bombing victims and wishes he could go home like them; and Max returned from the front, tormented by headaches and emotionally shattered. After Georg kisses a boy he’d befriended, he sets out alone for home. Binder, who left Germany for the U.S. as a child, based her book partly on her father’s experiences in the Hitler Youth organization and on her paternal grandfather’s journals from between the wars, and describes the war’s toll on German soldiers and civilians while lingering on an eerie, subtle irony in descriptions of Jews, Roma, gays, and people with mental illnesses, whose dire circumstances their neighbors were blissfully unaware of. This provides a fresh take on the madness of war.

May 1, 2020
A rural German family faces the end of World War II and all its dangers. The war is racing toward its conclusion in Germany, but the danger for the rural Huber family is far from over. Aside from suffering the daily hardships--finding food in the shops is a struggle, for example--Etta Huber fears for the safety of her sons. Max, the elder, has mysteriously returned home from the front, but he's unreachable, barely himself, altered forever by what he has witnessed. His 15-year-old brother, Georg, is at a school for Hitler Youth, drilling in preparation for the hopeless and final burst of fighting to come. Meanwhile, Etta's husband, Josef, grows more distant and nationalistic; he wants to fight for German pride, too. Then Max disappears, and Georg flees from his school, an act for which he could be hanged, and the novel shifts into an increasingly dizzying nightmare until its harrowing conclusion. Binder provides a family's-eye view of the terror and trauma, offering readers a unique perspective on the war. The narration closely follows Etta and Georg in turns, delivering the details of privation and fear as well as surprising moments of kinship and generosity with an unforgettable grace. "They planted boys in the stony fields and up along the hills," Georg observes. "They planted them, and crosses grew." The future is unimaginable, Binder writes--and yet, somehow, those who are left will find a way to carry on. A masterful story of war, horror, and love.

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May 15, 2020
In 1945, with WWII entering its final stage, Max returns from the front to his home in a small German town. He is nothing like the laughing boy his mother, Etta, remembers: he behaves strangely, going for long walks, visiting the cemetery, and saying things that seem to make no sense. Soon, Etta shifts from relief that her son is home to fear that he will be taken from her. Her husband, preoccupied with radio reports as the desperate army reaches for old men and boys to fill its ranks, is no help. Meanwhile, Etta's younger son, Georg, is sent from a school for Hitler Youth to work with his classmates at digging out from the rubble after bombings. But as he witnesses the horrors of a nation on the brink of complete devastation as the war nears its end, Georg will choose a dangerous new course in his own quest to return home. This stark accounting of the personal damage inflicted by war draws its power from its homey details, as one family's life is blown apart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)