By Lauren Bell
A Boy is Not a Ghost is based on the true story of author Edeet Ravel’s fifth grade teacher, Nahum Halpern, now located in Montréal. The respect Ravel has for him is evident in her writing, and it’s not surprising to me that Halpern became a teacher, as his fictionalized counterpart, Nat, has an admirable love for reading and an unbounded inquisitiveness. Nat’s story spans from summer 1941 to winter 1994, and is the sequel to A Boy is Not a Bird, also written by Ravel. I have not read the prior novel, but I had no difficulty catching on to the plot from the first chapter.
Nat starts the story as a 12-year-old travelling to Siberia after having been forced to leave his home of Czernowitz. Accompanying him is his mother and a disparate group of individuals thrown together by circumstance. Early in the novel, the prose reflects Nat’s age with multiple !!! punctuating exclamatory sentences and CAPITALIZED WORDS FOR EMPHASIS, obviously reflecting the novel’s targeted younger audience. As Nat matures, the writing does as well, but I found it to be very readable for the age group it was written for. For instance, Nat is clever enough to know to read and write letters to his family in code, but Ravel follows each letter with an explanation of the letter’s intended meaning. She also uses the concept of quotas to explain some of the inexplicable acts of violence occurred during the war, and revisits the metaphor of being a ghost multiple times in the plot to reflect Nat’s changing perspectives.
The group’s arrival in Siberia ultimately results in their disbandment, with some characters moving on to better circumstances and others not. Nat notes that “adults get noticed but kids slip through the cracks,” prompting him to do grown-up things such as bribing guards for the safety of others. Nat’s mother is soon arrested, and he is left in the care of their friend Irene, who leaves him to the Mindru family shortly after—but not before teaching him the skill of networking, which becomes integral to his survival.
The tragedies happening around Nat prematurely age him, with the pattern of being left behind by others leaving a significant imprint on him and the decisions he makes. By the second and third parts of the story, he transitions from being the person who is left to the one leaving others. When he is finally reunited with his mother, their relationship has shifted so that he takes on the role of the guardian instead.
I quite enjoyed reading A Boy is Not a Ghost and would very much recommend it to younger readers. The casual reflections made by Nat are thought provoking (“Stalin makes us all storytellers”) and Ravel’s descriptions of Siberia echo the bleakness of their altered world, where someone’s survival is dependent on having an indoor job vs. an outdoor one. Essentially, A Boy is Not a Ghost is not only an important war story, but also an important bildungsroman.
Thank you to Groundwood Books for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.