Inside the cellar, these men, women, and children put their hopes and dreams on hold as they wait out the war. Outside the safety of their refuge the war rages on-fiery bombs torch the countryside, Japanese soldiers round up and interrogate innocent people, and from the hills guerilla fighters wage a desperate campaign against the enemy.
While the Karangalan family and their neighbors huddle together for survival in the cellar of a house, they tell magical stories to one another based on Filipino myth that transport the listeners from the chaos of the war around them and give them new resolve to continue fighting. Through the eyes of three narrators, thirteen-year-old Alejandro Karangalan, his spirited older sister Isabelle, and Domingo, a passionate guerilla commander, we see how ordinary people find hope for survival where none seems to exist. When the Elephants Dance is set in the waning days of World War II, as the Japanese and the Americans engage in a fierce battle for possession of the Philippine Islands. Once in a great while comes a storyteller who can illuminate worlds large and small, in ways both magical and true to life. And our Philippine Islands? We are the small chickens.” Sad and lovely, often at the same time, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes takes us to places where we are happy to linger, in the world and in the human heart.“Papa explains the war like this: ‘When the elephants dance, the chickens must be careful.’ The great beasts, as they circle one another, shaking the trees and trumpeting loudly, are the Amerikanos and the Japanese as they fight. In these stories, Tess Uriza Holthe peers deeply into the inner lives of these women and men. At the center we find beautiful, bereaved Claudette, wife of the doomed Chazz, making the journey to Cannes, where she, like all the others, remembers her past and draws from it irresolvable feelings of strength and fragility, meaning and emptiness, permanence and loss. In a series of linked stories, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes takes readers onto the 5:45 train to Cannes, linking northern Italy with the French Riviera while running like a thread through lives that touch one another in unexpected and often secret ways: Chazz, the heir to a great fortune GianCarlo, a kindhearted young Italian thief Anais, who feels the insults of age and Sophie, a talented young photographer. Tess Uriza's second book, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes, was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2007 and an ALA Notable Book of 2007. When the Elephants Dance is inspired, in part, by the experiences of her father, who was a young boy in the Philippines during World War II. She grew up on a Filipino-American family in San Francisco. Description: TESS URIZA HOLTHE is the author of the critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling When the Elephants Dance.Born: in San Francisco, The United States.
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