Taking flight
New war stories for younger readers to mark Anzac Day.
Two wars, two New Zealand writers at the top of their game, both exploring the role of our airmen in two world wars, yet with distinctly different flavours.
Brian Falkner, whose alt history Battle saurus won the Hell Young Adult award last year, places his teen flyer in KIWIS AT WAR 1917: Machines of
War ( Scholastic, $19) in the Royal Flying Corps, that band of boys – most under 20 – who soared above the mess and mud of battle for the first time. Their life expectancy was short – the “flyboys”, who went up in pairs, did not even have the luxury of parachutes. Riveting reading.
By World War II, at least there were parachutes. Planes and crews were much larger – eight in the Lancaster bomber that 18-year-old Jack flies in FLIGHT
PATH (Puffin, $20). David Hill’s fourth war story ( Enemy Camp took Hell Children’s Choice for Junior Fiction last year) has a more intimate feel than Falkner’s, with more of the tentative exploration of emotional states Hill does so well.
American Jew Michael Bornstein had vowed never to speak of his past. At a movie in the 1980s, he had been shocked to see himself on the screen, as a fouryear-old liberated by the Soviets. But it was not until much later, when he saw that same image used by Holocaust deniers, that he decided he must speak out. SURVIVORS CLUB: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz (Text, $26), is told to his daughter Debbie Bornstein Holin stat, and much of it makes harrowing reading. Yet his indomitable spirit, and sense of being miraculously saved, redeems this memoir.
A sweet story for younger readers, finely balancing suspense with everyday detail,
THE BICYCLE SPY (Scholastic, $25) is New Yorker Yona Zeldis McDonough’s tale of a bike-mad boy who unwittingly acts as a courier for the French Resistance in WWII. Pedalling over cobblestones to deliver his baker-mother’s baguettes – with gingerbread to distract the occasional soldier – Marcel dreams of taking part in the cancelled Tours de France. But his friendship with the new girl in town, another cyclist, will test both his cycling skills and his courage.
Can there be any survivors left from WWI? Well, yes – and she’s been resident in New Zealand since 1916. TORTY AND THE SOLDIER
(Scholastic, $28) tells how a Kiwi medical orderly rescued a tortoise – already thought to be 100 – from the wheels of a gun wagon in Greece and smuggled her home. Writer Jennifer Beck and illustrator Fifi Colston combine their considerable talents in this tribute to the last living link with our WWI fallen.
Let’s not forget … war still affects lives in countless countries, most tragically in Syria – where New Zealanders fought in WWI. STEPPING STONES: A Refugee Family’s
Journey (UQP, $26) is the story of those Syrian refugees who “walked to the end of the earth” to find a future. Told by Dutch-Canadian Margriet Ruurs, with Syrian Nizar Ali Badr’s extraordinary pictures crafted from beach stones, this also includes Arabic text.