I Wish I’d Written... Stones in Water

Rachel Anderson on a war novel that is fast, vivid, economical and truthful …<!--break-->

For anyone not yet mature enough to tackle Primo Levi, Stones in Water could be read as a juvenile substitute. A naive Italian is taken into captivity (Nazi slave-labour camp) where, against all the odds, like Levi, he survives, only to emerge into the chaos of a rapidly disintegrating central Europe. Here is the nightmare landscape which Primo Levi described so vividly, without infrastructure or frontiers, peopled by desperate peasants, and disillusioned but volatile soldiery who don’t care which side you’re on.

The Venetian gondolier’s son struggles to find a way home. And though his brutal experiences haven’t destroyed him, they have changed him fundamentally, awakening him to political maturity and commitment.

Writing war fiction for younger people is as fiddly as laying a minefield. Too much realism (specially those long stretches when nothing happens except snow and starvation), and you’ve lost the reader’s attention. Too ripping a yarn and you glamorise. Too many warm friendships with fellow victims and it’s a quick slide into the bunker of sentimentality. But Donna Jo Napoli, who researched her story at the Red Cross Archive in Geneva, has got it right. Fast, vivid, economical, truthful.

Stones in Water by Donna Jo Napoli is published by Oxford Children’s Books (0 19 275169 7, £4.99 pbk). Rachel Anderson’s latest book is The Flight of the Emu (Hodder Signature, 0 340 79939 0, £4.99 pbk).