I’ll Keep You Close

Jeska Verstegen's I'll Keep You Close is a quiet family mystery for 9 year olds about a girl who hears one strange name and cannot let it go.

What happens

Jesje is eleven. She lives in a Dutch town with her mother, her father, her older sister and a house full of beautiful old things. Fossils. Coloured glass. A little travelling clock that never travels anywhere.

She sharpens twigs on the school paving stones to make trick pencils. She slips between the stair railings every time she passes, to check she isn't growing too fast.

Her mother is harder to read. When she has had enough of the world she puts Mozart on and pulls the curtains, and Jesje has learned to watch for the signs.

Then two things happen close together. At school they start the Second World War, and the temperature in the dining room drops. And at the nursing home, her grandmother looks straight at Jesje and calls her Hesje.

Who's Hesje? Her mother says she's someone from long ago, that she's no longer alive, and that it doesn't concern Jesje. Then she clams up like an oyster.

So Jesje starts a notebook. Her father is a journalist and he has taught her that a proper story needs six questions answered. Who, what, where, how, why and when. She writes Hesje at the top of the first page and begins.

It reads like being inside a careful child's head. Very short paragraphs. Small ordinary things noticed hard, like the sound of gravel under your shoes or the way her friend Lienke's scarred fingers curl like ten question marks. Then a line lands that the reader understands slightly before Jesje does.

A word before you hand it over, because this is gentler on the surface than it is underneath. Jesje's class is taught about the Second World War and about what happened to Jewish people under the Germans, and the book does not soften it. Her grandmother is clearly dying. Her mother's fear turns up in places a child can't predict, and a checked jacket on a sale rail is enough to set it off. For one awful day a girl at school is treated as contagious by everyone, Jesje included, and the book makes her admit that.

Nothing is graphic. But this one asks your reader to sit with adult sadness, and a child who wants a puzzle and nothing heavier may find it isn't what they picked up.

For a reader who's ready for it, it's beautiful. And short.

What to read next

If they want another girl working out what a war did to the people around her, try When the War Came Home. Natty is packed off to a Welsh village where the young men have come back from the trenches changed, one of them barely older than she is.