‘How Huge the Night’ by Heather Munn and Lydia Munn – Book Review

One of my topics of great interest is the treatment of the Jewish people during World War II. My interest was spurred by the assigned reading of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ in sixth grade. So when I read the synopsis of ‘How Huge the Night’ by Heather Munn and Lydia Munn, my curiosity was piqued.

Here is the synopsis of this novel:

Based on Actual Events.

When Had God Ever Stopped A War Because A Teenager Asked Him To?

For fifteen-year-old Julien Losier, life will never be the same. His family has relocated to southern France to outrun Hitler’s menace. But Julien doesn’t want to run. He doesn’t want to huddle around the radio at night, waiting to hear news through buzzing static. Julien doesn’t want to wait.

Angry, frustrated, and itching to do something, Julien finds a battle everywhere he turns.

Soon after his family opens their home to a Jewish boy needing refuge, Julien meets Nina, a young Austrian who has fled her home by her father’s dying command. Nina’s situation is grave and Julien suddenly realizes the enormity of having someone’s life or death depend on…him.

Thrown together by a conflict that’s too big for them to understand, each one struggles to know what to do, even if it is not enough. Is there a greater purpose in the shadows of this terrible war? Or will their choices put them in greater danger?

Here are the biographies of this daughter/mother author duo:

Heather Munn was born in Northern Ireland of American parents and grew up in the south of France where her parents and grandparents worked as missionaries. She decided to be a writer at the age of five when her mother read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books aloud, but worried that she couldn’t write about her childhood because she couldn’t remember it. When she was young, her favorite time of day was after supper when the family would gather and her father would read a chapter from a novel. Heather went to French school until her teens, and grew up hearing the story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, only an hour’s drive away. She has a BA in literature from Wheaton College and lives in a Christian international community in rural Illinois with her husband, Paul, where they offer free spiritual retreats to people coming out of homelessness and addiction. She enjoys wandering in the woods, gardening, writing, and splitting wood.

Lydia Munn was homeschooled for five years because there was no school where her parents served as missionaries in the savannahs of northern Brazil. There was no public library either, but Lydia read every book she could get her hands on. This led naturally to her choice of an English major at Wheaton College, where she earned a BA in literature. Her original plan to teach high school in English gradually transitioned into a lifelong love of teaching the Bible to both adults and young people in southern France, where she has also been church planting, since 1983. Ten of those years were spent in St. Etienne, near the small town in the central mountains of France that provides the settings of How Huge the Night. She and her husband, Jim, have two children: their son, Robin, and their daughter, Heather.

Here is the trailer for this interesting book:

Several characters have a strong faith in God. Here is Julien, one of the main characters, early on in the story:

Julien looked up. The moon was gone, and so were the stars, and he was on his knees. “God,” he whispered. His voice was dry. “God. Please don’t let them get to Paris. Please keep…everybody…safe.” He sounded like a child – and God bless Mommy. When had God ever stopped a war because a teenager asked him to? The image came back, the tanks firing, the recoil, Vincent’s face grinning. He could never be a soldier. Never drive a tank.

It was unbearable.

I want to do something, God. Let me do something. Please. The word serve rose in his mind, the word protect, but he couldn’t even think them; it sounded stupid. What did he know how to do? Do the dishes, play soccer. Split wood. (pp. 16-17)

Another strong man of faith was Pastor Alex. He advocated action against evil:

        Then Pastor Alex spoke of evil.

He spoke of the Nazis and the things they did. He spoke of Kristallnacht, and Julien clenched his teeth. He asked if we must sit passively by while evil overcomes good. Julien lifted his head.

Pastor Alex leaned forward. Jesus didn’t say, “Don’t kill your enemies.” Would Jesus simply command us not to act in the face of evil, he who won the greatest victory, who conquered sin and death? No, friends, no. What did Jesus tell us to do to our enemies?

Love them.

“Jesus,” said Pastor Alex, and his voice almost shook. “Jesus, the only begotten Son of the Father, offers us this chance to be his brothers and his sisters and to fight as he fought; he gives us his weapons, the Father’s weapons, the weapons of the Spirit.” He sounded reverent, almost in awe. “The weapons of love,” he said. “Fearless love.”

Julien sat straighter. Fearless love. Even if he was never a soldier. Was that what Pastor Alex was saying? He could still fight. (p. 101)

There were two different storylines alternating through the book – that of Julien and his family, and that of the brother and sister, Gustav and Nina. It was interesting how the two stories converged toward the end of the book.

In the Historical Note (by Heather) at the end of the book, she explains how much of the history is based on fact. She also explained why she (along with her mother) wrote a book set in this time period:

One of the reasons this period of history fascinates me is choices. In France under the Nazis, people made all kinds of choices. Some got rich off the black market; some through collaboration. Some used the Nazis for revenge, feeding them true or false information against their enemies. Some followed Petain unquestioningly; some just survived, as attentistes, “wait-ists,” who chose not to get involved. Some vowed to fight the Germans to the bitter end and started the Resistance, which in those early days seemed completely doomed. And a few, like the people of a village in central France called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, chose to focus on those in the deepest need and danger, and protect them from harm. (p. 302)

Heather closes out her Historical Note this way:

At the end of the book, Julien expects his country to be under Nazi domination for the rest of his life. This also is accurate. There was no good reason, then, to think otherwise. It is with no hope in sight that the people of Le Chambon trusted God and did what they could for the people they saw being persecuted. Sixty-five years later what they did is still remembered. I hope it always will be. (p. 304)

I really liked this book. It was interesting to get inside the mind of young people who lived in France in 1940. It must have been a scary time, both in terms of what was happening with Hitler and Germany, as well as the normal hormonal trials of teenagers.

Although this book is categorized as Teen Fiction, I think it appeals to all age groups. It is a terrific book to encourage a young person to read; they may not have previously been aware of the events of World War II and Hitler’s persecution of God’s Chosen People. This book would be a great introduction. And it is written in an interesting and engaging style, which would appeal to all ages.

You can order this book here.

This book was published by Kregel Publications and provided by them for review purposes.

Interview with Heather Munn and Lydia Munn, authors of ‘How Huge the Night’

Tomorrow, I will be posting a book review of ‘How Huge the Night’ by mother/daughter duo, Heather and Lydia Munn. Here is an interview with them to prime the pump before the review! The questions and answers help to understand the background behind the writing of this interesting novel.

1. What influence has living in France had on the writing of this book?

Heather: I grew up in France, from two years old to about seventeen. Up to ninth grade I went to French public school. The town I lived in was only about an hour’s drive from Le Chambon-sur-Lignon where the true story happened. So when I wrote about Julien living in a small French town, going to school there, and so on, it was almost like writing about my own childhood—except I had to keep asking my dad what it was like forty or fifty years earlier! But it’s more than just the school part—the love for the land that I hope comes through in the book is very much rooted in my childhood—that specific landscape, those hills with genêt bushes on them and pastures and stone farmhouses and little woods—and also the people, the French country people and their culture that’s very rooted in the land, that’s a side of France that Americans don’t get to see a lot, and I love it.

Lydia: When you live in a country for almost thirty years, you grow to love it and its people. I’m glad to be able to write something very positive about France, to counter the mostly negative opinions that I find when I visit the US. Living close to the area where the events happened also made it relatively easy to get a good sense of the context of the story. For instance, I used the actual home of friends of ours who lived in Le Chambon as the model for the Losiers’ home in Tanieux.

2. How much research was involved in writing about historical events? How did you know how much historical detail to provide?

Heather: This might be a really good question for Mom; she did almost all the research and my impression is that it was an enormous amount. She made a timeline that went week by week and included major events of the book, events of the war, the passing of repressive or anti-Semitic laws by the Vichy government, everything relevant. I would call her up whenever I had a doubt about anything, or even to ask her “This happened on this date, but how soon would they know about it?” I did do some research of my own when I needed some particular detail about the war, especially when trying to get a feel for what it was like to be there at that time, how people were thinking—what people’s feelings were about the surrender, how people felt about Marshal Petain and the Vichy government right after it was set up, and whether and how much that changed when they started collaborating with the Nazis. I have always had a sort of fascination for World War II and its stories and what you can learn from them about good and evil.

Lydia: I have always felt that wartime is a fascinating period to study, though difficult at times, because war is so ugly. War brings out the worst in many people. But it brings out the best in others. And that best shines all the brighter for the very dark context in which you find it. My own interest in this period of French history came about because I wanted to tell the Le Chambon story. I read all the primary sources I could find, visited the town and talked with a few people who lived through the events. I also read all that I could about World War II as seen from the French viewpoint. Knowing the details of the Vichy government, the laws put in place, and so on, enabled us to put some of them into the book. We tried to put in details that Julien would have known about and, sometimes, worried over.

3. ‘How Huge the Night’ is written for 14- to 17-year-olds, but your readership can certainly go beyond that. How did you get into the mind of a teenager to write this authentically, and yet manage to pen a book that would be of interest to all ages?

Lydia: Even though the main character is a fifteen-year-old, this book was, from the beginning, more than just his story. It’s the story of a family and of a town. The choices that these larger circles were making have an influence on Julien’s choices. There are earlier versions of the book in which some of the scenes were written from Mama’s viewpoint. These ended up being cut in the final version. But behind the story the reader senses Mama’s dread of war which stems from her experiences in World War I. And Papa’s sense of history and of what the invasion really means, as well as Pastor Alex’s clear sightedness—these all form a very real part of the story. I believe this larger picture is what appeals to older readers.

Heather: When I was writing my initial version (after Mom’s initial version) I wasn’t even necessarily writing it for teenagers. But of course the book was chiefly about a teenager, and I wanted him to be a real teenager. I think a real teenager confronted by hard realities is interesting to any age. I still remember very vividly being a teenager and I remember it as a time when everything was felt so deeply, everything had huge significance. You know, when a young child starts learning about the world around him, he sees everything with totally fresh eyes and so he really sees it; and the teenager or young adult is at the end of that journey, at the part where he learns for the first time the really hard realities of life. Pain, and war, and necessity, and death, and the fact that there is no guarantee in life that there will always be someone standing between you and the fear. Watching someone learn those things for the first time, really see their significance, is an awesome thing, in the old sense of the word. That’ll never be boring, and I think an adult to whom it is boring might’ve gone too far into adulthood.

4. What do you hope readers take away from reading ‘How Huge the Night’?

Heather: A lot of things. Maybe I shouldn’t say all of them in case I make it too obvious! I think one thing is the huge significance of our daily choices, and how heroism isn’t generally glorious or even clear-cut. The choices that people really made during World War II, the early years, the part I’m writing about, were mostly made in the dark. The usual stuff you see in books and movies—“Am I going to risk my life to save these people from certain death?”—that’s after 1943. In the early years nobody knew about the death camps, not in France anyhow, and under the Vichy government, especially, nobody knew what was going to happen to the Jews if they got arrested, or to themselves if they protected them—they just knew something might happen, and it might be something bad. So it was easy for a lot of people to think, “Oh, but they wouldn’t kill them or anything, right?” because they had enough to worry about already. There was a food shortage, life was hard. The people who did the right thing, a lot of it was just the daily choosing to keep their eyes open, seek out the truth, really take a look at the people in front of them and ask themselves how God was calling them to respond. Julien ends up doing some very good things, but they’re very hidden, not a lot of people are ever going to know about them. And the people who do the real, profound good in the world, that’s how they do it. In a confusing, terrible, messy situation they keep listening to God; and when they hear, they obey; and what they do changes things. But mostly, no one ever knows.