Stevie‘s review of The Skylarks’ War by Hilary McKay
Historical Fiction published by Macmillan Children’s Books (UK) 20 Sep 18/Margaret K. McElderry Books (US) 18 Sep 18
Some huge events seem to lend themselves to being told most effectively in books aimed at a younger audience. While stories for adults can convey what life was like during times of upheaval for individuals, it can take a child’s point of view to really express the impact felt by ordinary people as a group. This book, published as The Skylarks’ War in the UK and Love to Everyone in the US, follows a group of youngsters coming of age in the years leading up to the First World War. I think I prefer the UK title, and I most definitely prefer the UK cover.
Clarry Penrose’s mother died within days of her birth, leaving Clarry and her older brother Peter to be brought up by a succession of housekeepers and neighbours, their father being emotionally and often physically absent. Their lives settle into two distinct patterns: Cornwall in the summer holidays, when they stay with their grandparents and their older cousin Rupert, and not-Cornwall for the rest of the year, when Peter goes to school and Clarry is mostly left to educate herself with the aid of Peter’s books and homework. In Cornwall, the children have all kinds of adventures and accidents, while their lives away from Cornwall seem grey and dull by comparison.
Eventually, Peter is deemed old enough and clever enough to be sent away to boarding school with Rupert, a fate he dreads. After a shaky start, however, he makes friends with a boy whose family live close to his own and whose sister soon befriends Clarry. Through her new friends, Clarry learns of the girls’ grammar school on the other side of town, and soon she is making plans to get a place there, with the prospect of one day being able to attend an Oxford college, just as everyone expects her brother to do.
The outbreak of war changes everyone’s lives. Rupert enlists, along with one of his school friends – much to his grandparents’ horror – and Clarry’s older friends go off to become nurses and carry out other vital work, leaving Clarry to try to keep house for her father. Peter, meanwhile, is at a bit of a loose end, prevented by a childhood injury from enlisting, until a chance meeting with an Oxford professor sends him down a very different career path from the one his father envisioned for him.
I loved the lyrical prose of this story and the way so much of what the children were thinking and feeling was conveyed in the letters and gifts they sent each other when separated by school or the war. I also liked the variety of characters we met and the way differences between then and now were explained simply but neatly as being the way things were done back then. The book doesn’t shy away from the horrors of war, but Clarry and her friends and family find a variety of ingenious ways to make life better, including spiriting away her grandfather’s old pony when he threatens to send it off to join Rupert at the front, Rupert’s letters home having painted a much cheerier picture of life in the trenches than anything he’s actually experiencing.
All in all, an excellent book that I’ll be buying for friends and relatives this Christmas, as well as looking out for other books by the author.
Grade: A
Summary:
Clarry Penrose finds the good in everyone. Even in her father, who isn’t fond of children, and especially girls. He doesn’t worry about her education, because he knows she won’t need it. Her grandparents, who care for her in the summers, assume that she’ll play nicely and do what she’s told. It’s the early twentieth century, after all, and the only thing girls are expected to do is behave.
But Clarry longs for a life of her own. She wants to dive off cliffs and go swimming with her brother Peter and cousin Rupert. And more than anything, she wants to get an education. She helps Peter with his homework all the time, so why can’t she manage it by herself? When war breaks out, Clarry is shocked to find that Rupert has enlisted, but she focuses on her schoolwork. Then Rupert is declared missing, and Clarry is devastated. Now she must take a momentous step into the wide world—for if she misses this chance, she may never make it.
No excerpt available.
