Review by Kelly Jarvis: When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman

I love Alice Hoffman’s writing, and I have long been a fan of her work, but her latest novel, When We Flew Away, awed me with its beautiful blend of devastating history and fairy tale enchantment. When We Flew Away tells the heavily researched but fictional story of Anne Frank and her family who have taken shelter in Amsterdam to escape the horrors of the Nazi regime. Although the family has found relative safety at the outset of the novel, they are aware of the growing dangers facing those of Jewish ancestry and faith, and they are actively seeking safety in America. As political circumstances in the Netherlands become dire over the two year span of the novel, the family struggles to maintain the artfully cultivated sense of peace that has helped them to survive in the face of overwhelming cultural and personal despair.  

In When We Flew Away, Hoffman weaves the history of Anne Frank and her family with myth, legend, and fairy tale to a brilliant effect. Anne and her older sister Margot, who are analogous to the two sisters featured in The Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red,” are as different from one another as they can be. Margot follows the rules, while Anne, who is gifted with an incredible imagination, likes to break them. Anne believes in wishing, and she sees the Netherlands as a world of ice in winter and tulips in spring, an outlook that later aligns with Hoffman’s brilliant exploration of life and death in the myth of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. Anne questions why men have more freedom than women and wonders why people fall in love. She talks to the magpies, dreams of becoming a writer, and pretends the stars her family are forced to wear have fallen from the sky because “you {have} to pretend some things in order to remain human.” While war rages around them, moving ever closer, the Frank family finds a way to live in the shadow of death, navigating both joy and loss, ultimately concluding that “love is everything, love is everywhere, it’s the one thing they can never take away from you.”

The title of the novel When We Flew Away refers to the flight of Jewish people trying to escape persecution, but it also refers to our desire to break the bonds of earth and soar away to a place more humane than the one we occupy, a place where Anne Frank, who died at the tender age of fifteen, might have lived to share her potential with the world. And yet, as sad as the stark realities behind both The Diary of Anne Frank and When We Flew Away are, the texts provide hope to their readers. In her author’s note at the back of the book, Hoffman explains that when she read Anne Frank’s diary as a child, it changed the person she would become and helped her to realize she could be a writer. Now, Hoffman has used her own brand of story magic to breathe new insight into the life and death of Anne Frank and all those who perished with her. Hoffman’s fictional account, which is highly recommended by the executive director of the Anne Frank House, adds poignancy and meaning to the history of World War II and the stories we tell about it. Anne Frank’s words changed Alice Hoffman’s life, and Alice Hoffman’s words will help a new generation of readers to discover Anne Frank, proving that even when hate seems strong, love is stronger, and that even when books are banned, stories will always go on. Both Frank and Hoffman teach readers that storytelling and imagination can transform and save the world.

“What happened once can happen again,” this book explains, and if there was ever a time to understand our history and contemplate the stories we tell about it, that time is now. Hoffman’s ability to honor the content of Anne Frank’s diary while embellishing her experience with fictional detail is pure literary enchantment, and it will help readers to better understand the pain and loss behind the historical statistics they learn in school. In Hoffman’s skilled hands, Anne Frank becomes a fully formed little girl with strengths, weaknesses, hopes, and dreams. When We Flew Away will move readers to tears, but it will also fill them with an appreciation for life itself. Hoffman’s stunning novel ensures that the story of the holocaust and the people who lived through it will never be forgotten.

When We Flew Away is a novel I plan to teach in my Young Adult Literature and Children’s Literature classes, and I will recommend that my students, who are all future K-12 teachers, share the book with their students as well. Read on its own or paired with The Diary Of Anne Frank, Hoffman’s novel will provide a wealth of opportunities for children and adults to contemplate the darkest and brightest aspects of human life, and it should be required reading for every student in America and around the world.  

When We Flew Away is a heartbreaking, breathtaking, and beautifully crafted book. You can find it here.

Thank you to NetGalley for a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair review.

Kelly Jarvis works as the Assistant Editor for The Fairy Tale Magazine where she writes stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and interviews. Her poetry has also been featured or is forthcoming in Blue Heron Review, Mermaids Monthly, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, The Magic of Us, A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, and Corvid Queen. Her short fiction has appeared in The Chamber Magazine and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/