- Hardcover: 96 pages
- Publisher: Pavilion Books; 1st edition (1 May 1989)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1851453539
- ISBN-13: 978-1851453535
- Product Dimensions: 26.4 x 19.6 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 968,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
Opening with a startling attention grabber - being awakened by an incendiary bomb that bounces between his bed and his mother's before it's deflected into the grate to explode up the chimney - Foreman reminisces about his WW II experiences on the Suffolk coast, just across the Channel from the enemy. Born in 1938, he was a toddler (as pictured in an endearing title-page photo) when the war began. His widowed mother kept a village shop frequented by the military; after a halfhearted attempt to send his brother to a safer place, she kept the family together. Foreman describes both daily life and extraordinary wartime incidents in fascinating detail, complementing his understated text with splendidly evocative watercolors and drawings. The fiery glow of the village church burning against a night sky; a little old lady on a bicycle sharing the street with a tank; rampant blooms amid rabble, grown from seeds displaced by bombing; childish high jinks and anxious races to shelters; flat, watery farmland, green and peaceful in the sun - each is rendered with insight and skill. Like Bill Poet's autobiography (1989, Caldecott Honor Book): a perfect blend of the verbal and pictorial to appeal to a wide age range. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
The award-winning illustrator of "Eric the Viking" and "Nicobobinus" looks back on his own wartime childhood, in this book which won the Kate Greenaway Medal 1990. His illustrations evoke the horror and beauty of blazing buildings and the comforts of childhood amid the shortages.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
This book brings a child's perspective of a life altering event to the attention of current contemporary readers, and their families with the aid of powerful illustrations. Books of this nature remind us all that children do indeed have a valuable perspective and voice to offer. Should be in every school library.
10 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This delightful story of a boy's experience of W.W 2 has an energy that is irresistable.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A Child's View of Wartime England!
24 May 2010
Format:Hardcover
Noted children's writer/illustrator Michael Foreman recaptures his childhood in wartime England in this charming, evocative book, a 1989 relase from Arcade Publishing. It offers a captivating look-back at a time and a place now far gone.
Foreman grew up in Pakefield, a fishing vilage on the coast of Suffolk. This area saw its share of air action during the war, bombing raids making up several drawings in WAR BOY. (An incendiary bomb actually went through his house). Foreman's illustrations of those raids - the AAA guns firing off, incendiaries burning in the street and German aircraft sweeping overheard - bring the war to vivid life. Yet other images show children playing in a shelter, a stretch of beach once a playground for residents now mined and blocked off with barbed wire, customers 'having a cuppa' at his mother's shop, barrage balloons floating in the sky, military parades, the arrival of the first Yanks and so on. The book ends with the ghostly image of an English youngster dressed as a native American and the evocative words that "the memory of those who passed through our village on the way to war will remain for ever with the ghosts of us children in the fields and woods of long ago."
In many ways, WAR BOY is a priceless treasure. Its vivid imagery and poignant commentary presents a fascinating and heartfelt portrait of wartime England. Highly recommended.
Foreman grew up in Pakefield, a fishing vilage on the coast of Suffolk. This area saw its share of air action during the war, bombing raids making up several drawings in WAR BOY. (An incendiary bomb actually went through his house). Foreman's illustrations of those raids - the AAA guns firing off, incendiaries burning in the street and German aircraft sweeping overheard - bring the war to vivid life. Yet other images show children playing in a shelter, a stretch of beach once a playground for residents now mined and blocked off with barbed wire, customers 'having a cuppa' at his mother's shop, barrage balloons floating in the sky, military parades, the arrival of the first Yanks and so on. The book ends with the ghostly image of an English youngster dressed as a native American and the evocative words that "the memory of those who passed through our village on the way to war will remain for ever with the ghosts of us children in the fields and woods of long ago."
In many ways, WAR BOY is a priceless treasure. Its vivid imagery and poignant commentary presents a fascinating and heartfelt portrait of wartime England. Highly recommended.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
It is an auto biography of a child during World War II
25 Feb 1999
Format:Hardcover
Lowestoft a quiet seaside town in Suffolk was in the front during World War II. Bombing raids, fire and trips to the air raid shelter bacame almost daily events for young Micheal Foreman growing up in the 1940's. He lived in a small house with his mother himself and his brother's( his father had died when he was a baby).
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