Tom's Private War
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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Tom's Private War
Illustrated by Kenny McKendry
Set in the opening weeks of the second world war, when a group of children at the end of summer are learning to cope with gasmasks and black outs and the prospect of threatening changes ahead of them, Tom's Private War is a short, exciting, old fashioned story of rivalry, courage and comradeship. Tom is a subordinate member of the gang who is beginning to fret against gangleader William's arrogant authority. When a bunch of tough refugees arrive from Liverpool, William retaliates by engineering a potentially lethal contest of daring between Tom and one of the newcomers. This book is very redolent of one of those children's thrillers written at the time that the action of this story takes place, so it achieves a pleasing sense of period authenticity in its telling as well as its content.
