When Angels Rest

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Real news is a rare commodity in Stay More, Arkansas, but twelve-year-old Dawny -- inspired by his hero Ernie Pyle -- finds enough local color to keep the townsfolk reading his weekly newspaper, The Stay Morning Star. One fixture of the paper is Dawny's regular report on the war between the Allies and the Axis, two roving bands of boys and girls whose fledgling identifies are reflections of the global battles of World War II. Fighting with sticks and spears, and competing in scrap drives and verbal jousts, the children who call themselves "Japs" and "Nazis" know their true enemies to be the "Allies", who are also the town bullies: Sog Alan, Larry Duckworth, and Jim John Witter.But the tenor of these games changes as developments bring the world's war closer to home: the crackle of the town's first radio delivers bad news on a daily basis, and a native son dies on Iwo Jima. For the first time ever, an airplane darkens the skies over Stay More, and soldiers occupy the isolated hills in training for an invasion of Japan. As the ways of outsiders seep into the tiny hamlet's routines, the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed. By turns comic, sad, and violent, When Angels Rest is a masterful work, part American tall tale, part hillbilly Paradiso.