GREAT BAY:---With the music of Betty V’s Hold on and Neville York’s Sweet Salt playing in the background, about 75 book party guests were treated here at the Parish Hall to an evening (7.7.18) of lively conversation, refreshments, autographs for their books, and Gerard van Veen reading passages from his World War II title Schoolboy in Wartime – Memories of My Early Years. The weekend affair was followed on Monday (7.9.18) by a book review from Gerard van Engelen in an Alkmaar newspaper calling Schoolboy in Wartime “a jewel.” Published in St. Martin by HNP, the new book recounts dramatic and dangerous experiences of the writer’s family and of his own childhood in Alkmaar during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Schoolboy in Wartime is available at Van Dorp, Arnia’s, and internationally at bit.ly/2uq6vlS