A Letter from Danielle for April ’24
Hi Everyone,
Well, we’re slowly tiptoeing out of winter, but not fully in spring yet. It still stays pretty chilly in April in most places, and in the two cities where I live, the weather doesn’t get warm ’til May or June, so we have a way to go until spring is really here.
Easter will be a nice little break for those who celebrate it, and Passover is usually around the same time. And even for those who don’t celebrate the holidays religiously, the Easter Bunny, Easter egg hunts, and dyeing Easter eggs and making baskets are upbeat happy past times. We dyed mountains of eggs when my kids were little, and made Easter baskets for teachers and friends. I always say about it that I had purple fingertips for the entire month from fishing the dyed eggs out of the little plastic cups with the dye in them, and then we placed them carefully in baskets full of purple or green grass!!!
I am very excited that my new hardcover book this month is one of my favorites, Only the Brave. It’s a World War II book, which is an era that fascinates me. World War I always seems much farther away and harder to relate to. Twenty-five years later, the world had changed a lot, and the World War II era seems much closer to us. And there is so much history and bravery we can relate to in books about that era. There was huge bravery in World War I as well, but that war began 110 years ago now, whereas World War II was 85 years ago and doesn’t seem quite as distant.
The book is about a very brave young woman who loses her parents in the war and, eventually, they lose everything—even their home—and she becomes separated from her sister as well. It’s about all the challenges she faced, and her bravery working with the Resistance to save Jewish children and get them safely out of Germany, risking her life to do so. There is something very noble and very human about the people who fought in those wars, and the constant danger they faced every day, especially in occupied countries. Those stories always touch my heart. So I hope you get to enjoy the book. It’s our book for Mother’s Day this year and tales of bravery make a great gift for the mothers and mother figures we love and respect for their own daily acts of courage. I hope you love that book yourself and give it as a gift!!! Have a great month.
Love,
Danielle