A Night Divided, by Jennifer A, Nielsen

Let’s Talk About Plot

I recently checked out a pile of juvenile historical fiction, only to discover I had carried home a book that I recognized as “already read.” My memory was that it was a story full of impossible plot points.

A Night Divided, by Jennifer A. Nielsen is an exciting and interesting book set in East Berlin in 1965. There are well-drawn characters with realistic interactions, accurate historical contexts, and compelling, suspenseful, even terrifying scenes. Nevertheless, two years after my first reading, my memory of the book was dominated by implausible premises that had bothered me:

• That a twelve-year-old girl in East Germany could see her father standing on a platform in the west and comprehend his pantomime of digging a tunnel.
• That using an anonymous pencil sketch, she could identify the vacant building from which she would dig.
• That guards patrolling the neighborhood never noticed the children entering the building on the wall, violating curfew, stealing a pulley, or carrying what would amount to truckloads of dirt and dumping it onto their “garden” project.
• That over the course of a few weeks, two children dug a tunnel fifty meters long and so high that Gerta’s arm grew numb holding it against a pipe overhead. It was wide enough to accommodate conversation among three people eating lunch and reading a letter.
• And that by some miracle of advanced engineering, they could connect to their father’s tunnel coming from the opposite direction.

Rereading the book, I was again pulled into a good story of courage, hard work, and love. But the same things bothered me again. Readers young and old want realism to be, well, realistic. So how great is a story if the plot itself is implausible? The book was published, my library bought it, and I’ve now read it twice. Hum. What do you think?