Morpurgo, Michael. Private Peaceful

This is a very clever and unique conceit for a war book: a young English soldier in World War I, Tom, stays awake for the entire night in the trenches of Belgium, reliving his memories and his life up to that point, while waiting for--something. It's a bit similar to The First Part Last, wherein a quiet book without a lot of forward momentum is pulled forward by the knowledge that something important is about to be revealed, and it works.

Tom enlists underage, a few weeks before his sixteenth birthday, because his older brother Charlie, whom he idolizes, is forced to go off to war. The first half of the book is taken up with Tom's childhood and adolescence in rural England before they go off to war; it's pastoral and lovely, though suffused with occasional tragedies and unhappiness--the father's death, unrequited love and jealousy. The rest of the book is training, and then the mud and lice of war in the trenches of World War I.

It's rare enough that I don't hate a war book, but I actually quite like this one. The sharp contrast between the countryside and the trenches, the dynamic of Charlie and Tom and their older, brain-damaged brother Big Joe, those are done really well--and the eight hours slowly ticking away towards a fate that only becomes clear at the very end. It doesn't get too capital-H Historical, which bothers me about novels that try to be educational; it's about a single real, specific person, and not about the war as a whole. More than the war, it's about two brothers who share everything with each other, and who will give anything for each other.

Morpurgo, Michael. Private Peaceful
. New York: Scholastic Press, 2003.