When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and simultaneously attacked the Philippines, eight-year-old Mary McKay, her parents, and several other American families working on Mindanao fled into the jungle for what they thought would be a short evacuation until they could be rescued by the Navy. Their wait lasted two years.

My Faraway Home is the fascinating story of how they survived. The refugees encountered typhoons, fires, and cobras; they lived on dwindling stores of canned food, traded with loyal Filipino villagers who wouldn't betray their hideout, and learned to improvise their own shoes (from rubber tires), soap (from pig fat), and other necessities. Into this upside-down world of anxious waiting and frayed tempers came occasional simple joys-a Fourth of July feast, a birthday party, a pet goldfish in a glass jar.

Mary Maynard also describes their escape on a submarine dodging enemy torpedoes, and recounts how her teen-aged brother, away in boarding school when the Japanese invaded, survived a prison camp and the bombing of Manila.

Like the classics The Diary of Anne Frank or Empire of the Sun, My Faraway Home gives a fresh perspective on war through a child's eyes. It is also a luminous coming-of-age story that captures the universal experience of a child's attempt to decipher the adult world.