War Is Over
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Transcending its time and period, this moving and lyrical story, beautifully illustrated, explores the fear and hope of children in time of war. I am just a child. How can I be at war? It’s 1918, and war is everywhere. John’s father is fighting in the trenches far away in France, while his mother works in a menacing munitions factory just along the road. His teacher says that John is fighting, too, that he is at war with enemy children in Germany who seem to be much like him. One day, in the wild woods outside town, John has an impossible moment: a dreamlike meeting with a German boy named Jan. John catches a glimpse of a better world, in which children like Jan and himself can one day scatter the seeds of peace. David Almond brings his ineffable sensibility to a poignant and ultimately hopeful tale of the effects of war on children, interwoven with David Litchfield’s gorgeous black-and-white illustrations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taut and teeming with emotion, Almond's historical novel is an affecting portrait of an English boy's perspective on a seemingly endless, unfathomable war. In 1918, John's father has been off fighting in France for so long that John hardly remembers him, and his mother works "overtime, double time" in an enormous munitions factory. Bewildered by his teacher's declaration that "we are all engaged in the fight to defeat the evil German," John "kept on daring to ask himself, I am just a child. How can I be at war?' " This question frames other experiences: he watches townsfolk pummel a pacifist, imagines being transported to the front, and has a dreamlike encounter with a German boy who's his same age and height and, John senses, is likewise "yearning for the war to end." The straightforward narrative by Almond (Skellig) juxtaposes moments of violence and beauty: John's mother explains how to fill a shell with shrapnel and resin, then spreads his bread with homemade rose hip jam. Reinforcing the atmosphere are often haunting black-and-white illustrations created by Litchfield (The Bear and the Piano); one especially effective image shows John watching pigeons overhead morph into shrapnel shells. Ages 9 12.
