Rumors of Peace

A young girl comes of age during World War II, confronting fear, discovering love, and struggling to understand human complexities in this literary novel. 

On December 7th, 1941, ten-year-old Suze Hansen’s life changed forever. Her beloved small Bay Area town of Mendoza, California, is now a potential target for Japanese Zeroes that laid waste to Pearl Harbor. Air raid drills become part of the school curriculum. Dark shades decorate house windows, and basements become bunkers during blackouts. Japanese American citizens lose homes and businesses as they’re rounded up into internment camps.

Between radio reports and newspaper and magazine articles, Suze consumes war imagery, fueling her fears and anxieties. She hates America’s enemies for destroying her certain and secure world. As the war rages over months and years, Suze grows up in its shadow, desperate to hold onto her childhood even as she experiences adolescent desires. But it is her evolving friendships with sisters Peggy and Helen Maria Hatton that challenge Suze’s constant worries and rigid beliefs, revealing truths about society and human nature that offer no answers to her questions about finding meaning in a world trapped in an endless cycle of violence.

Thought-provoking and insightful, Rumors of Peace is the story of one girl’s poignant journey of self-discovery during one of history’s most destructive conflicts. 

“One of those deceptively guileless novels, like A Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird, that sees more than it lets on.” —The New York Times Book Review 

“A book of acute insight and delicious humor. . . . Absorbing and poignant and full of difficult truth.” —New York Magazine