Beneath the Canopy follows two twelve-year-olds living through the Nazi-occupied Netherlands as friendship, courage, and small acts of kindness help them survive a world gone wrong. How did the real events and survivor memories behind the novel shape the story you ultimately wrote?

Joanne (Johanna) and Rein were my mother- and father-in-law, and I knew them for many years. Over the years, they shared pieces of their childhoods with me—Johanna growing up in Arnhem and Rein in Apeldoorn during the Nazi occupation. It always struck me how different their experiences and feelings about the war were in their retellings.

For Joanne, there wasn’t a time she recounted a memory of the war when she didn’t wrap her arms around herself, shiver, and mention how cold she always was. Knowing how she was dressed for nearly nine months and how little food she had—at one point, rations were down to roughly 300 calories a day—it’s no wonder those memories remained so vivid.

Rein’s memories of being a free-range, largely unsupervised boy were quite different. He spoke of heartache, pain, and grief, but he could also chuckle about the fun he and his buddies had getting into boyhood shenanigans. For years, Rein wanted me to write down his story. He was certain that the German officer in the bakery who gave him food saved his life. He was also certain that part of the story—the other side of the coin, if you will—needed to be told.

It was really for Rein that I began this story, but Joanne’s very different experience gave it the grounding it needed. Remarkably, during the last several months of the war, the two of them were living only about 650 meters apart.

Those memories stayed with me, and years later, when I began writing Beneath the Canopy, I didn’t want to write a novel about military strategy or battles. I wanted to write about what war looked like to children who still got hungry, annoyed, frightened, jealous, mischievous, and hopeful while enormous historical events were happening around them. I wanted the world not to forget that when adults escalate their conflicts into war, children are among the innocent victims.

The novel is fiction, and I gave Johanna and Rein experiences, relationships, and circumstances beyond what they shared with me. But their memories gave the story its emotional foundation. They reminded me that history isn’t only made up of dates and battles. It is also a child wondering where the next meal will come from, or whether someone they love will make it home.

Why was it important to preserve moments of ordinary childhood, including friendship and affection, alongside the darker realities of occupation?

Because they were still children.

I never wanted Johanna and Rein to become little adults simply because the circumstances around them were terrible. Children living through war still tease each other. They develop crushes. They laugh at inappropriate times. They get irritated with siblings. They want things they can’t have. Those moments aren’t a distraction from the history; to me, they make the history more understandable.

They also gave the characters—and the reader—room to breathe. If every page had been fear, hunger, and death, I think the children themselves would eventually disappear beneath the weight of the subject matter. The ordinary moments remind us exactly what was at stake: these were children trying to have childhoods in a world that kept taking pieces of childhood away from them.

The novel presents people whose choices do not always fit neatly into categories of hero or villain. Why was that complexity important?

Because people are complicated. I write about that a lot.

War makes us want very clear categories: heroes and villains, good people and bad people, courage and cowardice. History certainly gives us examples of all of those things. But individual human beings don’t always fit comfortably inside them.

Rein’s relationship with Heinrich was particularly important to me for that reason. Rein knows what the Nazi occupation has done to his country and to the people around him. At the same time, this particular German officer shows kindness to a hungry child. One truth doesn’t erase the other.

In that same vein, whenever Joanne talked about her years under occupation, she was adamant that her father, who worked for the Dutch police, was not a “sympatizer.” Her Dutch accent always made sympathizer come out without the “h,” and I can still hear her saying it.

One of Joanne’s biggest concerns while I was writing the book—and while she and Rein were reading drafts—was that readers understand that her father was an honorable man. He wasn’t cooperating with the Nazis because he supported them. He was a Dutch police officer living under occupation, required to continue doing the ordinary policing work of his community under the authority that now controlled it. Refusing to do his job could have had consequences for him and his family.  

Those kinds of contradictions mattered to me because occupation doesn’t leave people with simple choices, and I didn’t want to write characters who could all be neatly labeled hero or villain. Kindness doesn’t erase Heinrich’s place within an occupying force, just as continuing to do his job under occupation doesn’t make Joanne’s father a Nazi sympathizer. People and circumstances are more complicated than that.  

I wanted young readers to be allowed to sit with that discomfort rather than have me resolve it for them. Sometimes people make brave choices and selfish choices. Sometimes kindness comes from someone we don’t expect. Sometimes fear changes what a person is willing to do. Understanding those contradictions doesn’t excuse terrible actions, but it does help us understand human beings—and I think learning to recognize that complexity is enormously important.

Why was it important that liberation bring both joy and unresolved sorrow rather than a simple happy ending?

Because liberation ended the occupation. It didn’t erase what had happened.

I wanted the children to experience the extraordinary joy of being free again, because that joy was real. But so were the empty chairs, missing family members, destroyed homes, hunger, grief, and questions that some families carried for decades.

A simple happy ending would have felt dishonest to the people whose experiences inspired the book. Johanna and Rein survived. They grew up, built lives and families, and eventually came to the United States. There is enormous hope in that. But survival doesn’t mean walking away untouched.

For me, the hopeful part of the ending isn’t that everything becomes okay. It’s that after everything Johanna and Rein have endured, they can finally begin imagining what comes next.

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