Suspenseful Reading

I recently finished reading Elephant Run by Roland Smith. It's a young adult novel about Burma, Japan, elephants and WWII.

Burma is about the last place I would ever expect a young adult novel to be set, and in truth, this is one of the reasons I picked up the title. The uniqueness appealed to me.

Yet once I got started, I kept reading because I was thoroughly engaged in the plot. The main character, Nick, is a British boy whose parents are divorced and living on different continents -- his mother in England and his father in Burma.

When the Germans begin their steady bombing of London during WWII, it is decided that Nick should part ways with his mother and go live with his father in Burma, which is (supposedly) beyond the reach of the war.

But soon after Nick gets settled in with his dad, the Japanese march into the country, conquer Rangoon and begin sending captives to the Thai-Burma border to construct a railway bridge, which would become the real-life Bridge Over the River Kwai.

While Nick manages to avoid capture by the Japanese, his father doesn't. What will Nick do all alone in a foreign and war-torn land?