on him for help, as do all the other villagers left behind. Soon the Russians are at home on the farm, growing fat from Mother's cooking, caring for the sheep, horses, and each other. Then news stops coming from Uncle Marton. As months go by without word, they stay busy with work try to pretend they aren't worried. When a letter comes from Auntie's parents, Jancsi, Kate and Lily travel for two days to get them and take them to the farm. A chance stop at a hospital on the way home has the girls visiting the patients, including one amnesiac suffering from shell shock. He turns out to be Uncle Marton, who is sent home to recover. Fifteen-year-old Jancsi can relax and enjoy himself now that his father is home again, and they all desperately hope the war will be over before he has to go back. Finally the doctors decide even brave Uncle Márton's mind can only take so much horror, and they tell the family they will not be sending him back to the fighting. News comes to the farm that England and France have blockaded Germany, and German children are starving. The Hungarian government asks people to volunteer to take as many children as they can in, feed them, and care for them until the war ends. The Nagys take six. The fourth Christmas of the war there are twenty people in the house, Hungarian, German and Russian, eating, exchanging presents and telling stories. That spring Uncle Márton tells them the about the singing tree—an apple tree the men spotted one morning when all around them was barren and dead. It sang because it was alive with birds, all kinds of birds, that had sheltered in it during the night. "Perhaps they... were merely passing time until it would be safe to travel" he told them, but the tree would stay, "she, mother of all, she would remain the same." Finally, in fall of 1918, the war ends and men began returning home. "Uncle" Moses' only living son comes home to be a shop keeper like his father, the Russians prisoners and German children go home, Kate's father is coming back to the farm and everyone hopes the world has learned how to live at peace at last. Critical reception The Singing Tree was well received when it came out. Horn Book Magazine included it on