Drummer Boy

Always good to have history brought alive through a child narrator - here it is the Crimea with Charley, the Drummer Boy, taking us all the way from joining-up to the battles. But it is mostly half-hearted history, encounters with all the famous names of the time which become a little comical as we wait for them all to appear - 'O there's Mary Seacole, and isn't that Lord Cardigan?' The horrors of war seem conventional too and it is not until the book moves to an interest in gender issues that the story takes on some life of its own.