Summary: A coming-of-age story inspired by true events in Australia in World War I that explores the things that separate us and those that bring us together, from an award-winning author.
MY THOUGHTS:
Tales of World War One from the home front always interest me. This YA novel is an Aussie offering, and since my own forebears include a mixture of British and German settlers, the premise hooked me enough to reserve a copy from the library.
The setting is Langwarrin on the Mornington Peninsula. The story begins late 1914. Having just turned 14, Jack Thornton is too young to enlist as a soldier like his brother, Matt. Still, he is a fine athlete, a deadly accurate rifleman, and the star of the junior cadets. The old school teacher, Mr Kempster, has inflamed Jack with a passion to defend their nation against the hated Huns.
Jack and his mother, Ada, have a serious problem. With all able-bodied men away overseas, there are no pickers to help with their five acres of ripe apple trees. The crop will rot, and they'll go broke. But then they receive a repugnant offer they can't refuse. Prisoners from the local enemy alien camp have offered to help struggling farmers and orchardists to harvest their crops for minimum wage. The timing is too crucial, and the labor too cheap to deny. The Thorntons are assured that the pickers will be under strict surveillance.
Jack is in for the biggest attitude readjustment of his life. For of course the poor pickers sent to help are not hostile enemies at all, but a variety of men who have been majorly screwed over by the War Precaution Act of an ultra-sensitive nation. Some have never even set foot on Teutonic soil, others have lost positions in companies they helped found, and even more have been cruelly torn away from their loved ones.
When the German prisoners decide, for the sake of staying human, to put together their own slapdash production of Hamlet as they pick apples, Jack cannot help but be interested.
Walter Maberly, Jack's best buddy, is up to his neck in problems of his own. He befriends and champions Lotti, a girl of German descent, whose father is among the prisoners of war. And Walter's dad, the local postmaster, stirs the pot even more by offering Lotti's mother a job. Things get vitriolic, since Mr Maberly is already suspected of pacifist leanings.
Jack's 19-year-old brother, Matt, is part of the AIF (Australian Imperial Force). His newsy letters home to his family are valuable fodder from a historical perspective, including all the censored words intended to identify place and plan. Ada and Jack know he's in sandy Cairo with his battalion, awaiting their next orders. And with the benefit of decades, we readers predict that will turn out to be Gallipoli Cove (gulp).
At one stage I thumped this book down in disgust over a questionable, spur-of-the-moment decision Jack makes. There are emotive triggers aplenty. I definitely enjoyed the story but do wonder how well the Shakespearean content will go over with modern teens, the book's target audience. It rings true that a boy like Jack, in 1915, might find himself lured in by the Hamlet rehearsals. But how about his counterparts from the mid 2020s?
Time will tell.
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