Fourteen-year-old Louise Keller is astonished and then pleased that her parents have agreed to serve an appointment as Baptist missionaries in the Philippines. At first the Kellers live the somewhat privileged life of Americans in their missionary compound, even if they feel they are making sacrifices. World War II comes to the Philippines, and everyone’s lives change, even theirs. This is no longer an adventure. Readers experience Louise’s worry about her father being detained in Manila and her anguish as she realizes that her mother’s increasingly poor mental health will separate her from that parent, as well. They flee with others to the mountains but are discovered and confined by the Japanese in internment camps. The courage Louise summons to survive the ordeal stays with her until she and her greatly changed family leave the Philippines in 1945. Hertenstein’s first novel based in part upon historic events. (Ages 12-15)

This unusual first novel is based on true accounts of the imprisonment of American citizens in Japanese detention camps in the Philippines during World War U. Louise Keller travels with her missionary family to the Philippines on the eve of Pearl Harbor. At first the country seems like paradise, but soon Louise and her family are captured by the Japanese and forced to live in internment camps. An exciting and thought-provoking novel about human strength and weakness in wartime.