Lois makes many references to the soldiers’ black,
shiny boots in Number the Stars. When Lowry
submitted her finished manuscript, her editor thought
there were too many references to the boots. Lowry
said:
If any reviewer should call attention to the overuse of
that image … I would simply tell them that those high
shiny boots had trampled on several million
childhoods and I was sorry I hadn’t had several
million more pages on which to mention that.
The story's title is taken from a reference to Psalm
147, which is read out in a scene in the book. It says
that God is ‘He who numbers the stars one by one.’
Just as each star is named and known, so too is every
human lost to cruelty.
Lowry herself photographed the haunting image of
a young girl on the cover of nearly every edition of
the book. Her name was Anna Caterina Johnson, and
she was only ten when the photograph was taken.
In her acceptance speech for the 1990 Newbery
Award for Number the Stars, Lowry said:
As a writer, I find that I can only cover the small and
the ordinary—the mittens on a shivering child—and
hope that they evoke the larger events. The huge and
the horrible are beyond my powers.
Although Number the Stars is a children’s novel,
it is a book that I press upon people, begging them to
read. And it is a book that helped inspire The Beast’s
Garden, my own novel about resistance to the Nazis.
Kate Forsyth is the acclaimed author of
more than thirty books for children and
adults. The Beast's Garden is published
by Random House Australia.
www.kateforsyth.com.au