No.96 - War Boy

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!

No.97 - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I opened the pages of my little gold edged copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with hazy memories of the musical whirling around my head. Judy Garland skipping arm in arm with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion down the yellow brick road, rainbow coloured horses and of course the ruby slippers. And I've been humming 'If I only had a brain' for weeks now!

I'll admit to not really looking forward to reading this book. There were bound to be books on the list that I just wasn't going to get on with and I was convinced that this would be one of those. Written in 1900, I was expecting the language to be dense and dry, full of moral teaching and sensible advice for children, like other books of this period. However, I was pleasantly surprised! It's actually beautifully written and Baum doesn't lecture his readers at all. The plot moves at a good pace, with Dorothy being blown away on the first few pages, which was much quicker than I had expected! I was expecting pages of waffle about her life in Kansas, but I was pleased to get straight into the adventure.

Like most fairy stories, the original has its fair share of gruesomeness and I'm pleased to report that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is no exception! The Tin Woodman gives a lovely account of how he became a tin man by chopping off all his own limbs!! Given an enchanted axe by the Wicked
Witch of the East he then proceeds to accidentally cut off his arms, legs, head! Then to add insult to injury he manages to cut his own torso in half too! But luckily he gets each part sorted out by a tin smith and all is good! He is also not adverse to using his axe skills to save Dorothy and the others, chopping the heads off most of the enemies they come across! Another macabre touch are the pins that Oz puts in the Scarecrow's brain, which are supposed to show his sharp mind, but just protrude out of his scalp in a rather grim way when we he thinks too much! See the illustration below....

There are certainly a few things that are very different to the film. For example, there are no rainbow horses... they are all green. Also Dorothy's adventure was not a dream at all, but a real occurance! She arrives home find a new house has been built and that her aunt and uncle presume she has died! But far more shocking than that is that there are no famous ruby slippers in L. Frank Baum's book!! The shoes that Dorothy uses to get home to Kansas are in fact silver! They were changed to red in the film to show up in Technicolour! I guess silver slippers just weren't glamorous enough for Hollywood.

Thanks for reading X

Next up is Michael Foreman's War Boy, which I can't wait to write about! It was brilliant!