Fascinating look at a historical part of South Africa that I was unfamiliar with. This novel was extremely well written and pulled me right in as a reader. I appreciated being able to read and review the advanced reader’s copy.

Thank you for the chance to read this book. I don't have too much to say other than that I've never read a book about that time and that place and I think it's an important book to keep in mind if you're looking for any sort of historical fiction at all.

A powerful historical novel about the Boer War, a time and place we don't often get to read about. Bold, emotional writing from the perspective of a young girl, written beautifully. A tough but necessary read.

It took a little while to really engage with this read, but once I did I could not put it down. I love historical fiction and learning details about periods and places that I am unfamiliar with. This book was eye-opening to a time and place I knew very little about, and was also beautifully written. Heartbreaking at times, I felt the author conveyed the complexity of emotions through rich characters incredibly well.

Beautiful writing style. Elegant but raw. Real human emotion on every page. I could see the story happening in my mind as I read. Vivid description and character development. I felt like I knew the characters and could feel their reactions to events in the book. It was my first time reading a book about the Boer wars. Learned so much. Love when fiction books give great historical information. What a fun way to learn history. Great book. Don't pass it by.
Received a digital copy from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.

The Lost History of Stars by Dave Boling begins on the day that fourteen year Lettie lost her home. British soldiers come in and torch their houses and then send the family to a concentration camp where they all live in a tent shared with another family. The story is mostly set in the camp. We get to see the kind of life that the Afrikaners live there. There are a few chapters that contain flashbacks of life before the camp.

Lottie is the main character and narrator for this story. She is young, barely a teen but forced to adjust to a different life. I really liked her character. First of all, she is a bookworm. Even in the camp, Lottie still found a way to get lost in books. She was quite strong despite her circumstances. I sympathized with her due to what she was going through. Lottie was at a sensitive age, learning about boys, womanhood but experiencing these things in the midst of the chaos that was the camp life. The story was heartbreaking. Needless to say, life at the camp was hard. The living conditions were terrible. So many people died especially the kids.

Through Lettie, we get to meet different characters. I really liked her friend Janetta. The two girls were prisoners but they had such a wonderful friendship. I liked how they used to spend hours talking about boys. It was nice seeing Lettie getting to experience such a friendship but still heartbreaking. Another character who stood out was a British soldier called Tommy Maples, a young soldier who didn’t want to be there in the first place. Tommy was an interesting character and the only soldier who seemed to show compassion to the prisoners. However, Tommy presented the other side of the story. He portrayed soldiers also affected by the war. His kindness and compassion helped in showing a different side of the war.

Although this is fiction, the book is inspired by true events. It is set in South Africa during the Boer War. This war left a lot of women and children dead from disease in concentration camps. The fact that the book is inspired by true historical events makes it even more heartbreaking. It covers an important part of history that I didn’t know about. It is definitely a book that I recommend to all fans of this genre.

The Lost History of Stars by Dave Boling is a powerful and shocking story about a family during The Second Anglo-Boer War during the early part of the 20th century in Africa. It's a historical fiction story that is inspired by true events. The Lost History of Stars is a story of desperation and hope. 

The main character, Lettie, who is a thirteen year old Dutch-Africkaner girl comes from a poor farming family. She endures the loss of her home with her mother and two younger siblings when the scorched earth policy employed by the British during the Boer War burns their farm and forces them to leave in a wagon. Their African maid, Bina, tries to stay with the family, but is given no choice by the soldiers but to return to her people.

Lettie and her family are sent to a concentration camp where the conditions are awful. Her father, older brother, uncles, and grandfather are sent to fight the British with guerrilla tactics. Lettie worries and wonders about Bina and her family. Often Lettie remembers the songs and wisdom Bina shared during her childhood and the history of stars that Grandpa shared with her at night under the sparkling sky.

The story is told from Lettie's point of view. The reader learns of her experience in the concentration camp. Lettie attempt to find the good in small moments. Her more treasured possession is her English dictionary, which she reads for comfort to pass time. 

The story switches between the present and past. This allows the reader to understand life before the war and during the war. It give the reader background information to understand the family dynamics. 

I received this book from Algonquin Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Lost History of Stars by Dave Boling is another story of horrific atrocities and war told through the eyes of a child. This story is of the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa in which thousands of children died of deprivation and disease in internment camps. This book speaks to the power of fiction to convey a history I know very little about. It teaches and sends me off to do more research on the non-fiction actual history of events. For that, I appreciate the book.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/09/the-lost-history-of-stars.html

Reviewed for NetGalley

The Boers were Dutch descendants, many settling on farmlands in the remote interior of South Africa. The discovery of gold and diamonds pitted the Boers against British colonial interests in the Boer War (1899-1902). While husbands, fathers and sons joined the Boer commandos, women and children stepped up to farm the land. Determined to succeed, the British used scorched earth tactics to destroy family life and livelihood.

Our narrator, thirteen year old, Lettie Venter was working with her mother and siblings on the family farm when British soldiers arrived. The family quickly gathered a few belongings then watched the soldiers torch their farm and slaughter the livestock. The family was then taken by oxcart, joining a caravan earmarked for a concentration camp, a four day journey while experiencing thirst, hunger, overcrowding and overheating. This was just the beginning.

The concentration camp was a densely populated tent city where the fenced in women and children were treated like undesirables. Unreasonable rules were posted throughout the camp. Poor rations and unsanitary conditions, including lack of soap, prevailed.

Lettie Venter kept a journal to write down her thoughts. The journal helped her cope with camp conditions. Having very little paper, she stole camp rule signs that were posted and used the backs of the paper to record memories, especially of night time star gazing with her grandpa who now fought with the Boer commandos. The journal was cathartic, it helped her express her feelings. As time progressed, any togetherness the camp members felt was replaced by suspicion and lack of interest. Lettie's recorded sadness and loss that was palpable. She walked with her eyes downcast to prevent eye contact.

Tommy Maples, a young British guard, over time became a friend of sorts. He described his distaste of war and the concentration camp. At great risk to himself, on two separate occasions, Maples showed compassion for Lettie and her plight. He lent her a copy of "David Copperfield" which she devoured while taking walks in the enclosure. A gift of a stolen potato was a difficult event to read about. The raw potato, to be divided among the residents of the Venter tent, had to be cooked. With no kindling available, Lettie sacrificed pages of her notebooks to heat the potato while inhaling the potato's aroma. Each person's share of the cooked potato was minuscule.

"The Lost History of Stars" by Dave Boling was a well researched history of the hunger, starvation, disease and death of women and children housed in concentration camps as seen through the eyes of a thirteen year old girl. The story is compelling and begs to draw comparison to the feelings and ruminations of Anne Frank. Greed, as a motivating factor, caused 22,000 Boer children to die in British concentration camps. This historical fiction tome has presented a history of women and children as devastating collateral damage of the Boer War. I highly recommend it.

Thank you Algonquin Books and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "The Lost History of Stars.

The Lost History of the Stars takes place during the Boer war in South Africa in 1900. Dutch settlers are being forced from their land by British soldiers and herded into concentration camps. The narrator is Lettie, a 13-year-old Boer. The men in Lettie’s family leave their farm in order to fight the British, and Lettie, her mother, and two younger siblings are left on the farm on their own. When British soldiers come and burn down the family’s farmhouse, she, her mother, and her siblings are forced into a concentration camp. The majority of the story takes place in that concentration camp. It is a crowded, filthy, horrific place, and Lettie attempts to combat her loneliness and boredom by writing in a journal and walking around the camp, reading. She eventually befriends a young British soldier who is guarding the camp, and their relationship complicates her understanding of the war and of human nature.

Much of the story is brutal. The conditions in the concentration camp are harsh and unforgiving. Lettie and her family battle disease, cold, starvation, death, and incredible filth. The story is interspersed with Lettie’s recollections of life on the farm prior to the war, which slows the story down, and at times makes it drag. I knew nothing about the Boer war before reading this novel, so it was an illuminating look at a time in history that was unfamiliar to me. There was interesting exploration of human nature and war, but mostly this is a story of survival, perseverance, courage, family, love, and willpower.

I received a digital copy of this book from Netgalley/the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The Lost History of Stars is a novel by Dave Boling. I was looking forward to reading this book because it is set in South Africa, just like one of my all-time favorites- The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. Almost immediately, I realized there was a connection between the books: in The Power of One, the English protagonist is severely bullied by Boer boys at his boarding school as punishment for the abuse their grandparents suffered in concentration camps at the hands of the English. The Lost History of Stars is an account of life in the camps as seen by a teenage girl.

Lettie is sent to a concentration camp along with her brother and mother after their farm is burned to the ground by the English. Her father, older brother, grandfather, and uncles are all conducting guerilla operations against the English. Conditions in the camp are bleak, and disease is rampant. Lettie is rather stoic about her experience, and tries to find pleasure in small moments. One of her most treasured possessions is her English dictionary, which she reads for comfort and to pass the time.

Lettie’s narrative shifts between the present and the past, providing the reader with vignettes of what her life was like on the farm before the war began. This background information helps define the dynamic between Lettie’s family members, some of whom are also in the camp.

The Lost History of Stars is a powerful novel that resonated with me. It is a story of desperation and it is a story of hope. Lettie is an insightful narrator, but she is still a young girl. The reader might pick up on some aspects of the plot that Lettie fails to realize the significance of. This does not make her an unreliable narrator per se, but rather, this serves as a more genuine account than having a preternaturally smart narrator. I would absolutely recommend The Lost History of Stars.

So I'll start of by saying that I'm probably a bit biased in my rating, as I'm Afrikaans this book feels very close to my heart. An easy-reading but insightful portrayal of the Boer war. The facts are rather shocking - in a two year war twenty-two thousand Boer children died in the concentration camps - more than the combined fatalities among soldiers on both sides.
This is the story about fourteen-year old Lettie, who ends up in one of these camps, after being forcefully removed from her farm. Similar to Anne Frank, initially Lettie focuses on everyday things like making friends, and the lack of boys in the camp. As time goes on we get to experience the horror (physical and emotional) of being locked up in a camp like animals. I loved that the author also included a British soldier's experience, as a reminder that war is horrible for all involved. The strength of the Afrikaans women/mothers in all situations - running a farm by themselves after all the males left for the war, or trying to look after their children in the camps - is what will stay with me longest. I highly recommend this to anyone that enjoys historical fiction.

This novel feels both familiar and foreign at the same time. I've read lots of historical fiction and a decent number of concentration camp accounts, both fiction and nonfiction. However, I knew nothing about the Boer War except for the name. As the introduction says, this book is intended to bring to light "a twentieth-century atrocity -- a war against children -- that has been largely forgotten." With excellent pacing and character development, it does its job well.

Set during the Second Boer War, The Lost History of Stars follows Dutch Afrikaner Lettie, her mother, and her siblings as the men fight the British. Forced from their home, Lettie, Willem, Cecilia, and their mother are taken to a concentration camp. Supposedly, this is for their own protection. In the camp, the conditions are barely tolerable as they live in tents, share filthy latrines, and haul water via buckets. Often, there is no fuel for cooking fires for what little food they are given. On top of this, multiple families hare each tent. There is no formal schooling and illness runs rampant.

Lettie and her family must make do and part of her perseverance comes from what she learned in the past, and is shown through alternating flashback chapters in the first two sections of the novel. These chapters demonstrate how Lettie traveled into the bush with her father and older brother, Schalk. They also show the nights spent learning the stars with her grandfather and days spent receiving schooling from her Tante (Aunt) Hannah. Lettie uses these experiences to stay strong and learn from those around her as she both survives and come of age during a dark time in her life.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Lost History of Stars. Despite the somber topic, it was poetically written and the characters were strong. Lettie never let anything get her down despite the whole world seeming to be against her. It also astounded me that a man could pen a novel from a feminine perspective and have it come through without sounding overly masculine as I have often found to be the case. In comparison, the concentration camps in the Boer Wars were more reminiscent of the Japanese civilian POW camps, such as in the novel Thief of Glory, than those of the Holocaust. Either way, both were far from ideal. Throughout the novel, Boling managed vivid description and compelling dialogue that kept a reader drawn in.

What a book! Really enjoyed! Highly recommend. Perfect book club pick!

A quick history quiz: Can you recite ANY facts about the Boer War?

Few of us can. Although it was this war (actually the second Boer War, but because the first is even less-known than the first, it is commonly referred to as the Boer War) from October 1889 through May 1902 between the British and the Boer in South Africa that paved the road for the concentration camps of World War II, it has been largely forgotten.

Until now. The fight between the Boer, the common term for Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans descended from the Dutch East India Company’s original settlers, and the British originated over a century of conflict, but was sparked by the question of who would benefit from the Witwatersrand gold mines. That spark would ignite the most terrific cruelties of war, and set the stage for Dave Boling’s new novel, “The Lost History of Stars" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).

Boling admits he struggled with the novel from the beginning. “One of the original impetuses for ‘The Lost History of Stars’ was that my grandfather had been some manner of camp guard in the British Army during the Boer War,” he writes in an essay. Yet this was not to be a novel about British superiority. This was a work about the inhumanity of war.

How to tell that story?

The author worked through two drafts before trusting the voice of 12-year-old Aletta Venter. Through Lettie’s eyes, Boling crafts a narrative about her family’s removal from their farm by British soldiers while the men are away fighting. Lettie and her family are among thousands of Afrikaner women and children detained in the squalor of the typhoid-riddled confinements. At this point, the novel touches reality. This truly happened.

Above everything, though, Lettie is a survivor. It is her imagination and memory that arms her with the weapons of hope and faith even as she watches disease and death claim those closest to her. In the harshest of realities, Lettie finds friendship and comes of age while nourishing the remembrances of stargazing with her grandfather and the future of her goal to be a writer.

Armed with these shields against despair, Lettie works at her chosen craft, even to the point when paper was scarce by using the backs of the bulletins posted throughout the camp listing the rules those interred were to follow. Innocently honest, she justifies the actions because, as she notes, there was no rule against writing on the blank back of the rules.

With such optimism, it is hard not to draw comparisons with that other waif of internment, Anne Frank. Indeed, in his essay Boling admits he thought often of Frank as he placed Lettie “within the first institutionalized concentration camps, four decades before the Nazi experiment in inhumanity.” Lettie and Frank, the author writes, are “sisters displaced by time.”

But that displacement vanishes when Boling erases the distance in an author’s note: “I discovered that 22,000 Boer children died in British concentration camps — more than the combined fatalities among soldiers on both sides. It wasn’t on the scale of the Holocaust, nor was it of genocidal intent, but it is nevertheless a 20th-century atrocity — a war against children — that has been largely forgotten.”

That may be because history, after all, is written by the victors. Yet, at one point in the novel, a solider holds a bayonet to Lettie’s chest as an adult comes to her defense. “It’s not your war,” the soldier screams at her.
But it is. In fact, as Boling writes in his essay, it’s everyone’s war: “Through Aletta’s eyes, and through my research, I saw more clearly two of the great fallacies of war: One is the common notion that soldiers monopolize the pain and death. It’s just that here are no medals or parades for the innocents who die in every way. The other is that (all) anybody ever learns ... from a war ... (are) new ways to conduct later wars.”

This is the lesson of Boling’s great literary achievement. Displaced by time, but joined by greed and inhumanity and gross conflict, “The Lost History of Stars” is an important, reachable novel that speaks across centuries.

Presenting life from a child's perspective is a challenging task for a writer. A child's first person perspective is the most unreliable narrator but, it is the kind of subjective narration that reaches the reader's heart and soul with laser beams of joy and sorrow. In his new novel, <i>The Lost History of Stars</i>, Dave Boling has created a witness to the horrors of life in a concentration camp during the British-Boer War of 1899-02. Lettie is a thirteen year old Dutch Afrikaner who is forced into a concentration camp with her mother and younger brother and sister after the British soldiers burn down their house. Lettie's older brother, father, and grandfather are soldiers fighting the British. The farms were considered a source of support and supplies for the Dutch Afrikaner soldiers so a solution for the British troops was to burn their houses and kill their livestock.

Women and children were herded together into a camp for 'support' which turned out to be a place of great suffering and loss. Lettie tells her story of living in a guarded camp without enough food, medicine, or hygienic living conditions. Lettie loves to read and write so we get glimpses into the things she writes in her journal and her impressions of reading about British culture from the book, <i>David Copperfield</i>. Lettie has big dreams for her life and we hope that she will achieve every one of them, especially when it comes to helping other people. She has seen more than her share of evil at a young age.

Unfortunately, these kinds of stories are being played out all over the world still, today. Refugee camps are very often a misnomer and thus ignored by the world vision. If only lessons were learned from history.

ARC received courtesy of NetGalley and Algonquin Books (June 6th 2017).

I liked how this was written and learning a bit about the Boer War. I know it was teen fiction and I could deal with that, but I was hoping for a bit more "meat" to it. It was a very awful time of history and not many people know about it. Perhaps this book will help teens know more than my generation knows of the tragedies of this place and time.

Man's inhumanity to man. The horrors of war are the same no matter which war is being fought.

The Boer War seems to be a little known war in the U.S. I had heard of it, of course, but knew very few details. The Lost History of Stars puts a human face on the details. It was impossible for me not to draw similarities between these concentration camps and the concentration camps of WWII. No matter how much I try, I will never understand how human beings can treat other humans this way. Maybe some day we will grow beyond these horrors.