A Coming Evil

The main character of the story is Lisette, who is 12. Brigettte is her best friend. The story takes place in France in 1940 after the start of WWII and the Germans are occupying Paris.

Lisette's parents, who have recently had a baby boy, send Lisette to the country to live with her cousin Cecile who is two years younger than her. During the trip there Lisette watches as German soldiers remove Jews from the train.

Unfortunately for Lisette there are five even younger children staying with her relatives. The children also happen to be gypsies, people who the Nazis don't like. Lisette finds out there's a haunted hill nearby so she plans to go explore there.

Lisette does manage to meet a ghost, too. The ghost seems as afraid of her as she is of it. They try to hold a conversation, but she can't hear anything the ghost is saying.

There is great fear of the Germans finding the gypsy children, and Lisette's Aunt has a regular drill where the children hide just in case the Germans were ever to come to the house to search it.

Lisette manages to “talk” to the ghost some more and finds out he thinks it's the year 1314, and he's clearly shocked to learn it's 1940. She is somehow soon after able to actually hear the ghost and talk to it, but another problem arises; the ghost apparently is existing in a reality of its own in the past and does not see the things that Lisette sees in her time (such as the farmhouse.)

Gerard becomes more and more real to the point where he can now interact with physical objects in our world, including eating and milking a goat. That ability to interact becomes critical when German soldiers descend on the house, threatening Listette.

This is a very good book, especially in that it shows two time periods and what happened during them. The 1940's being the time of Adolph Hitler, the Nazis, and their program against those who were Jewish or otherwise didn't fit their picture of “acceptable” people. The other story is of the Knights Templars and the types of things then encountered from the kings and popes of Europe. Both the Jews and the Knights Templars became objects of hatred and murder, their property and money taken, both groups tortured, and both groups subject to having their people burned alive. (The difference lay in technology; by the time of the Nazis the means for killing large numbers of people were available which were not available to those who were killed the Templars, otherwise many more of them would have died that were actually killed.)

It's not a happy story. It's a story of how people try to survive when faced with overwhelming forces of evil. Still, it's a very good story and an extremely different way of handling the existence of a ghost.

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