Finished: Warlight (Ondaatje) A pretty good book about two British siblings left on their own with questionable "guardians" as their parents go off to a mysterious job assignment in the year following the end of World War II. Fourteen year old Nathaniel and sixteen year old Rachel are told by their parents that their father is accepting a new job in Singapore and they will be gone for a year before they have the children join them. They expect them to stay at their private schools and live with a mysterious family friend named Walter, who the kids secretly call The Moth. The father leaves first and the mother spends the next few weeks meticulously packing her trunk, involving the kids in all the decisions, and spending as much quality time as she can with them. They are, of course, devastated when she leaves, but they get used to their life with The Moth. The Moth has many friends, just as mysterious, who come in and out of the house and this extended group of friends essentially becomes a family for Nathaniel and Rachel. After a few months, Rachel stumbles upon her mother's neatly packed trunk, hidden in the basement! Did she not really leave? Was she even alive? The kids have all kinds of questions for The Moth, but he can only tell them that their mother is safe. Rachel comes to resent and even hate her mother as she grows into a young woman much in need of her mom. She becomes close to The Moth though, as a father figure. Nathaniel goes to work at one of the hotels that The Moth has an interest in and meets a girl, Agnes, that he begins a relationship with. He also becomes very close to Darter one of the strange friends of The Moth's, who is at the house night and day. Darter convinces The Moth to let Nathaniel run barges with him in the middle of the night transporting illegal racing dogs into London. Nathaniel and Agnes end up living quite the life, sneaking into empty houses for sale to spend alone time, and then traveling up and down the river with Darter late at night. After more than a year, and after the kids realize that their parents are probably not really coming back, Nathaniel notices a strange man following him. The man appears again, and then the third time, tries to kidnap both Nathaniel and Rachel. The Moth and Darter, along with another strange man that Nathaniel recognizes, defend and protect the kids...The Moth paying with his life. :-( When Nathaniel wakes up from the chloroform that the kidnapper used, there is his mother! She appears to be very acquainted with all the protective men, whose job it has been all along to keep the kids safe. We find out then that their mother has been working as an agent in the British intelligence since war time, and is still working for them, tying up loose ends, searching out enemy groups that may try to reassemble, etc. When she sees that her children are in danger from these groups, she cold turkey gives it all up and moves back to the tiny home village where she grew up with Nathaniel. Rachel wants nothing to do with her and never sees her again. Nathaniel finds out a bit more about his mother as they share time together, but they are never as carefree and close again as they were before she left. She enlists her next door neighbor, a farmer, to take Nathaniel under his wing....essentially, she's arranged another protector for him. She never knows when someone from her past may come to exact revenge. By the way, at this point in the story, the dad is just never heard from again and the mother is apparently fine with that because he was a loose canon and not a nice man. Anyway, during this time, we learn all about the sixteen year old boy, Marsh Felon, who first met the mother when she was eight, and how as they stayed in touch over the years, he became the person who recruited her fresh out of college, married and with a baby, to work for the British intelligence. We see how much they grow to mean to each other, and how intertwined they stay their whole lives. When eighteen year old Nathaniel goes off to college in America, he is notified that first semester that his mother has been killed. A relation of one of her former enemies has finally sought her out and killed her. Many people come to her funeral, but it isn't until many years later, after much research, himself working in British intelligence records, that Nathaniel realizes that Marsh Felon was the tall man who came to his mother's funeral and tried to console him. Nathaniel also seeks out some of the people from his past. He can't find Agnes, because he never knew her real name. He does find Darter though, but Darter isn't happy to see him. He is married with a child now and is anxious for Nathaniel to make his visit a quick one. As Nathaniel uses Darter's restroom, he sees a cross stitch on the wall that is an obscure quote that Agnes once said to him. He realizes as he leaves that when he was taken away by his mother, he was never even given a chance to say goodbye to Agnes or Darter, and that with all their empty house shenanigans, Agnes must have been pregnant with his child. Darter, then, even though much older, must have married Agnes to give her and the child a home. The books ends as Nathaniel makes this realization. Warlight is a pretty good book, well written, with good character development and lovely details and descriptions. It just wasn't quite what I expected it was going to be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. :-)