Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A timely story about war and peace, 3 Sep 2004
This thought-provoking novel takes place during the build-up to the war with Iraq. Sixteen year-old Hilde is forced to go and live with her father on an American air-base in Suffolk whilst her mother travels to Iraq to protest against the war. She hates it, it represents everything she disagrees with, but she gets drawn into an archological dig on the site and helps excavate the grave of Maethilde, a 6th c peace weaver. Hilde takes a gold brooch from the grave, meaning to hand it in at the next opportunity, but somehow she cannot and begins to dream about its owner. Gradually, she is challenged to speak out about her beliefs, to try to convince other people that the war is wrong - no easy task given the military community where she is living.
The story switches between Hilde's and Maethilde's worlds, getting underneath the skin of both girls, contrasting their cultural and historical perspectives and their ultimate effectiveness in influencing those around them.
This is a book that needed to be written. Published in the category of Teen Fiction, it could be enjoyed by intelligent twelves through Young Adults. Political themes are rare in books for young people and Jarman has tackled this one in a way which will inform and challenge. However, the story is not all bleak and pessimistic, it is also warm, funny, about the pain of growing up and about family relationships. Buy it for a young person you know.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
words..the weapons that make sense, 29 Jun 2004
By A Customer
The Peace Weavers is a gripping tale for our times... all times.Set on an American airbase in England in 2003, it begins fifteen hundred years ago.Julia Jarman weaves parallel stories of sixth century Maethilde with twenty first century Hilde to create a compelling plot which explores the idea of peace as something woven, like cloth, by "word weavers".Although the novel was written on the eve of battle in Iraq, it's not about Iraq. It's about emotional intelligence; moral responsibility; the difficulty of making "right" decisions in the real world.
I suspect The Peace Weavers will be bought in batches for the reading lists of Citizenship courses. Never preachy or didactic it asks big questions but doesn't presume to tell us the answers.It inspired passionate debate in our house! The characters,like us,have options. They make their own decisions...and mistakes. They find the world isn't always a safe, cosy place, and it isn't just the decision makers who bear the consequences. Bad things happen to good people...just like real life. Like the characters, lots of young people today are looking for a way to influence those we've chosen as our political leaders. They know that no sane person wants war. Many teenagers from broken homes know that everybody pays when relationships break down.This story shows the similarities between, and difficulties of, the relationships between individuals and between nations.It asks, is fighting ever justified? If so, when? And if we have to fight, how do we do it?
The only weapons that make sense, as this intriguing story shows, are the ones employed by "word weavers"; talk, discussion and argument. Good relationships between people, nations and ideas are made by the right words in the right places.Peace woven by "word weavers".Great stuff!!If a book gets the audience it deserves, this will be a best seller!!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Timely, passionate and gripping, 13 Dec 2005
By A Customer
What can one person do when the world seems to have gone mad? That's the dilemma facing Julia Jarman's spirited heroine, Hilde. In her new home on a US air base, she feels completely at odds with her surroundings. Fervently against the Iraq war, she terms herself a "peace weaver", and against her story Jarman puts that of Maethilde, a sixth-century woman pushed into a political marriage. The relationship between present-day characters Hilde and Friedman, son of a US air force officer and the last boy she'd expect to be attracted to, is poignantly and sympathetically drawn. A novel with pace and intrigue, but subtle enough to please the most discerning reader.Just one quibble. Why, when the hardback has such a striking, beautiful and eye-catching cover, has the paperback been given this pallid alternative?
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