Someday We Will Fly Blog Tour: Deleted Scene + Giveaway

Welcome to the Someday We Will Fly Blog Tour!

To celebrate the release of Someday We Will Fly by Rachel DeWoskin, blogs across the web are featuring exclusive content from Rachel, as well as 5 chances to win a copy of Someday We Will Fly and two authentic Chinese bookmarks!

Description:

From the author of Blind, a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story set during World War II in Shanghai, one of the only places Jews without visas could find refuge.

Warsaw, Poland. The year is 1940 and Lillia is fifteen when her mother, Alenka, disappears and her father flees with Lillia and her younger sister, Naomi, to Shanghai, one of the few places that will accept Jews without visas. There they struggle to make a life; they have no money, there is little work, no decent place to live, a culture that doesn't understand them. And always the worry about Alenka. How will she find them? Is she still alive? 

Meanwhile Lillia is growing up, trying to care for Naomi, whose development is frighteningly slow, in part from malnourishment. Lillia finds an outlet for her artistic talent by making puppets, remembering the happy days in Warsaw when her family was circus performers. She attends school sporadically, makes friends with Wei, a Chinese boy, and finds work as a performer at a "gentlemen's club" without her father's knowledge.

But meanwhile the conflict grows more intense as the Americans declare war and the Japanese force the Americans in Shanghai into camps. More bombing, more death. Can they survive, caught in the crossfire?

★ "DeWoskin explores a rarely depicted topic...A beautifully nuanced exploration of culture and people." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

★ "An unusual portrait of what war does to families in general and children in particular... affirms the human need for art and beauty in hard times." - Booklist, starred review

Buy: Amazon | Indiebound

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Deleted Scene

Oh my god. This was so much fun. I have an EPIC folder of cut scenes, and here’s a weird one, which although it didn’t make it in, informed some of Lillia’s inner life. Sometimes I have to imagine what my character has seen in the world, and how she ties it to what she’s read or imagined, and how that combination changes or shapes her thinking. This was too off-topic to keep in the book, but I knew she was a girl noticing dogs and thinking about foxes. . .And I knew Mrs. Campton loved and always made time for Lillia and her thoughts and stories. So in a sense, this cut scene (and many others like it) runs underneath the scenes that made it into the novel.

A strange stray dog flashed by on the street while I was out getting flour for Taube. There were so many people and, as always, animals, wagons, bicycles, rickshaws, but she wove through it almost as if she were made of vapor, sleek, ephemeral.

At school, I told Mrs. Campton about the dog, how it looked almost like a ghost. “She was so thin and red in the light she looked like she was glowing,” I said For some reason, I didn’t want to stop talking. “Or a fox,” I said, and then, “I used to have a dog in Poland, and-” an image of Pete flashed into my mind so abruptly and vividly that I could feel his warmth, hear the pattern of his breathing, and then that breathing morphed into my Mama’s laughter. 

Mrs. Campton listened patiently, waited.  It was the most I’d ever said to her and I began to feel the embarrassment that came over me whenever I spoke. But I continued. “My Mama is lost,” I said, “maybe in Poland, or maybe forever, but I thought maybe she or my dog, Pete – well, that one of them was sending me a message.” 

Why had I told Mrs. Campton this silly story? I was nothing more than a child, relaying my idiotic dream to an adult. But Mrs. Campton went to fetch something from her desk. She returned holding a slim, worn book and handed it to me. On the cover were several Chinese characters, and underneath them, English: Animal Legends. It was full of legends, of phoenixes, dragons, snakes, goldfish, and foxes. I sat at my desk that day and read the whole volume; she never interrupted me once, not even for exercise in the yard.

Foxes, the book promised, whether real or imagined, are symbols of feminine creative energy and beauty. The fox is solitary but loves her family and makes a home for herself, one she improves year after year, even though she is forced to spend many months away from it. When a fox turns 50, maybe she’ll become human. And at 100? Then she can choose to be a wizard or a beautiful young woman with whom all men must fall in love. Late in the day, I told Mrs. Campton about the story Kassia had read me before I left Warsaw: the one of the dove girl saving her eagle brothers. 

When I finished speaking, Mrs. Campton put her arms around me and I let her hug me for a moment before I slipped away, sleek and solitary as a fox.

Blog Tour Schedule:

April 15th - The Fandom

April 16th - A Dream Within A Dream

April 17th - BookhoundsYA

April 18th - Fangirlish

April 19th - Novel Novice

Rachel DeWoskin spent her twenties in China as the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera that inspired her memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. She is the author of Repeat After Me and Big Girl Small, which received the American Library Association's Alex Award for an adult book with special appeal to teen readers; Rachel's conversations with young readers inspired her to write her first YA novel, Blind. Rachel is on the faculty of the University of Chicago, where she teaches creative writing. She lives in Chicago with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two daughters. Rachel and her family spent six summers in Shanghai while she researched Someday We Will Fly.

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One (1) winner will receive a hardcover copy of Someday We Will Fly, a beautiful Classic Style Chinese Blue and White Porcelain Metal Stainless Bookmark, and a wooden bookmark hand-selected in Shanghai
 

US/Canada Only
Ends April 30th at midnight ET

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