Thank you to the linguistic integrity team: Jenny and Emmy (Swedish), Francesca (Portuguese), Katerina (German) and a delightful Facebook crowdsource (Russian).

Kennet Fiskare’s booty of silverware was taken from a story told by J. Ted Hartman, who served in combat with the 11th Armored Division from January 1944 to May of 1945. You can read Hartman’s entire memoir in Tank Driver: With the 11th Armored from the Battle of the Bulge to VE Day, Indiana University Press, 2014.

Kennet’s extraordinary fifteen minutes in the North Platte Canteen was inspired by Bob Greene’s book, Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen, Harper Collins, 2002. It was Pvt. Jack Manion who stood on the platform between cars and leaned out to touch his parents’ hands as the troop train passed the little depot at Kearney, Nebraska.

The exceptional bravery, along with the tragic prosecution and incarceration of American homosexual troops in World War II is recounted in stark detail in Coming Out Under Fire by Allan Bérubé, University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

I had no idea of the legend of Napoleon’s gold being lost in the St. Lawrence River until I read Thomas Pullyblank’s Napoleon’s Gold: A Legend of the St. Lawrence River. As well as giving me a golden idea, the book was full of real-life details that give a book authenticity. I read it just once, committed as much as possible to memory, and then didn’t trust myself to look at it again. He’s too good a writer, too much of an expert, and I’d either despair or plagiarize if I read it again.

In addition to the above books, online research was the life’s blood of this novel. I really don’t know how people wrote books before the Internet and it’s hard to know who to thank for the almost magical amount of information available if you’re willing to hunt for it. So…thank you, Internet?

All the Swedish folk and fairy tales were found in first editions of beautiful, old books scanned to and available from the Internet Archive website.

The story of the Fiskare brothers delivering a case of bootlegged whiskey to Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby was a real-life event experienced by Dan and Rolland Garnsey, who, according to their grandson Jeff, were “two of the most well-known, if not the most notorious bootleggers” in Clayton.

Ingrid Fiskare’s experience as a YMCA volunteer during World War I was taken from the accounts of Marion Baldwin and Ethel Ash, both who ran YMCA canteens in France. You can read more about Baldwin in her book Canteening Overseas 1917-1919, and read more about Ash in the article “In Her Words: Women’s Duty and Service in World War I,” at the Smithsonian National Postal Service’s website.