The Foreshadowing
This book by Marcus Sedgwick was another disappointment. I feel like I haven’t read a good book in ages. Anyway, I’ve ordered a few from Amazon.com so hopefully they’ll come soon enough. (Admittedly, I’ve been rereading some goodies, including Marion Molteno’s brilliant book, If you can walk, you can dance, but my aim on this site is to only review books new to me.)
It’s World War One, which is why I bought the book, because like probably a lot of people, WW1 is this horror that I can’t let go of, like a place rather than a time. Sasha finds herself starting to see the future, and funnily enough, it being a war, she sees people dying. See, the writer could have used this kind of ironically, but he doesn’t; it is what it is. Her older brother dies, a few people in the hospital die, and she realises the shell-shocked soldiers her dad are working with are probably getting tortured by him (and this isn’t really followed up, Marcus just wants to tell us about it), and then she sees her other brother going to die, so she ducks out to France and saves him.
I know what this reminds me of. When my sister was trying to study history for her HSC, I tried to write a story for her which included all the salient points she needed to know so it’d be easier for her to remember. Well, she failed; and so did I, such a story is impossible. Sedgwick is trying to do the same thing, make a story up from the bits of WW1 that he finds interesting. It doesn’t ring true. The writing is bland, the action is predictable and not very believable. And there’s just so many words which say nothing, chapters with nothing but I thought I thought I thought all the way through it.
This is the kind of empty children’s book that people think of when you say you love children’s literature and they can’t understand why. They don’t think of Joan Aiken who sketched out the utter horror of Vietnam in her story The Shadow Guests without mentioning that war at all.
It’s World War One, which is why I bought the book, because like probably a lot of people, WW1 is this horror that I can’t let go of, like a place rather than a time. Sasha finds herself starting to see the future, and funnily enough, it being a war, she sees people dying. See, the writer could have used this kind of ironically, but he doesn’t; it is what it is. Her older brother dies, a few people in the hospital die, and she realises the shell-shocked soldiers her dad are working with are probably getting tortured by him (and this isn’t really followed up, Marcus just wants to tell us about it), and then she sees her other brother going to die, so she ducks out to France and saves him.
I know what this reminds me of. When my sister was trying to study history for her HSC, I tried to write a story for her which included all the salient points she needed to know so it’d be easier for her to remember. Well, she failed; and so did I, such a story is impossible. Sedgwick is trying to do the same thing, make a story up from the bits of WW1 that he finds interesting. It doesn’t ring true. The writing is bland, the action is predictable and not very believable. And there’s just so many words which say nothing, chapters with nothing but I thought I thought I thought all the way through it.
This is the kind of empty children’s book that people think of when you say you love children’s literature and they can’t understand why. They don’t think of Joan Aiken who sketched out the utter horror of Vietnam in her story The Shadow Guests without mentioning that war at all.
posted by Carly at 8:04 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home