Bluebird by Sharon Cameron; Scholastic Press; (c) 2021; ISBN 9781338-355961; 438 pages plus appendices, $18.99.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — This is a novel about identities: those that are real and those that can be created. You need only think of yourself or your children to know about real identities. But what about created ones? There are those you might take on yourself — such as an actor does in assuming a new role — and there also are those that are imposed upon you.
Novelist Sharon Cameron weaves all three types of identities into this suspense novel that takes place at the end of World War II in Germany, then continues in the United States, where a Nazi doctor who worked on mind control experiments is on the loose. Never mind the horrible things that he did to prisoners at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin, agents of both the United States and the Soviet Union want to recruit him for their own “scientific” programs. But one of his female victims is determined to prevent that, even if by killing him, she will be treated by the Americans as a criminal.
We learn in this book of a young woman who grows up thinking that she is German, only to find that she is not. We learn of a young woman who is so disgusted after visiting the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and seeing skeletal bodies along with evidence of death and disease all around, that she renounces her family, and changes her name. And we learn of a young woman who, in a reflexive act of self-protection, reverts to her early childhood identity after being brutally gang raped by Russian soldiers.
The title, Bluebird, is derived from the nickname of one of the female characters who as a young girl was punished if she refused to kill on command a little bird put in her hands. Here we have a most terrible example of sadism, hauntingly described. The sadistic exercise was part of a mind control experiment–with its constant repetition, could the child be transformed into a killing machine, perhaps by use of a trigger word? Could the child, under hypnosis, be made to transform from sweet little girl to unapologetic killer?
While this horrifying experiment is vividly described, it is somewhat jarring to realize that in the gang rape of a young woman, the word “rape” is never mentioned; instead the act is broadly hinted at — the victim’s screams, her subsequent revulsion at the slightest touch of a man and her need to be protected, fed, and “mothered” by the young woman with whom she is traveling. In some books, not only is direct reference to rape proscribed, so are references to sexual union in a romantic relationship.
The reason is that Scholastic Press writes book for school children, in this case for grades 7 and up
While sex is an all but forbidden topic, the sadistic Nazi ideology — especially the idea that some kinds of people are subhuman and unworthy even of life — is explored and rejected in this novel. One has to wonder, what kinds of subjects are more corrosive? The idea that boys and girls, or men and women, will be sexually attracted to each other? The idea that men can be brutish and use violence to sexually dominate women? Or the idea that the murders of some people can be justified because they were born with the “wrong” racial characteristics?
In my view, if any of these issues is to be presented for students, it should be done honestly, straight-forwardly, without euphemisms, and dissected in such a manner that the students can reach mature judgments.
I am not faulting Cameron, who is a talented novelist; I think the rules under which books for school children are written need to reexamined periodically. The fact that Cameron was able to deal with such restrictions and still write a convincing, memorable novel, although perhaps too complex, is all to her credit.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com