Lizzie

Lizzie is both the narrator and the protagonist of the novel’s central story. At the opening of the novel, she is an 87-year-old woman who has been living in a nursing home for about a month. She is characterized as direct, spirited and candid, and occasionally has conflicts with the other nurses about drinking water or eating food, as she is frail. Ultimately, she is kind and outgoing.

For the bulk of the novel, Lizzie is a 16-year-old war refugee in Dresden, Germany. She can be temperamental but has a strong sense of justice and empathy. The core story of the novel can be characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, for Lizzie. When the novel begins, although she has a firm moral compass she fails to grasp the gravity of the war or the bombing, and instead places emphasis on the more immediate problems that surround...