I was told after my last post that I should have shown you all my lovely little copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately it was quite tricky to show the gold edged pages in a photo, but here is my little book anyway! I love the slightly camp cover illustration!
Anyway, to this post's book, War Boy by Michael Foreman, a memoir of the author's wartime childhood. This is really beautiful book! The illustrations are wonderful, and the observations are funny and moving. I reminds me of Laurie Lee's classic Cider with Rosie, with it's village anecdotes, vibrant characters and naive charm. It's a favourite of mine, and well worth a read!
War Boy begins with Michael remembering a bomb that came through the bedroom ceiling,
I woke up when the bomb came through the roof.
It came through at an angle, overflew my bed by
inches, bounced up over my mother's bed, hit the
mirror, dropped into the grate and exploded up
the chimney. It was an incendiary. A fire-bomb.
This introduction is poetic in both structure and style. It is a vivid image that you can see instantly in your mind's eye. You are catapulted straight into wartime Britain, and the rest of the story follows in the same way. Each page contains more illustration than text and this makes the story really engaging, as the words are not only written, but drawn and painted across the page. Foreman uses a mixture of single line drawings, wartime graphics, full page inky spreads, and delicate colour illustrations. Each page contains something different. The landscape orientation of the book gives the illustrations more room to tell the story, which is lovely!
The story is full of lots of little anecdotes about life in wartime Suffolk. Having lived near there as a child I recognised the place names which was nice, it was all rather familiar! I particularly liked the stories about the corner shop that his mother owned. As a toddler he used to sit in the window like some kind of display, and eat the sweets out of their jars! The shop seemed to be the heart of the village, a place where the soldiers and sailors could go for a cup of tea, a cigarette and a chat! Again, Foreman has illustrated this beautifully, in particular the grumpy old lady trying to get to the counter for her shopping!
This book is full of little gems, all illustrated in the most wonderful way. It is brilliant and touching story of life during the Second World War from a child's perspective, but it's also peppered with interesting facts about the troops and defences put in place on the Suffolk coast too. I'd thoroughly recommend Michael Foreman's War Boy to any child, or indeed anyone, wanting to learn a bit more about WW2.
Thanks for reading, L X
Next up is no. 95, Cornelia Funke's Inkheart. I've read the first few pages already and it's promising to be a really good read, so I'm quite excited! But... it's a huge book and I've got lots of stuff going on and another grown up book on the go too (Chocolat by Joanne Harris, I recommend it!), so I apologise in advance for the inevitably long wait for the next post! I may pop in a few other posts in the mean time about other things children's book related, so fear not!
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