Tunnel – DaneCobain.com

John Boyne – The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas | Review

Title: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Author: John Boyne

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 216

Rating 2/5

I’d heard such good things about this book and it left me so disappointed. I just struggled to suspend my disbelief throughout, and it also felt as though the author was constantly trying to exploit the reader’s emotions. On the back, it implied that it was for adults, whereas I felt it was more like middle grade. And then you can see the ending coming from a mile away, as soon as Bruno discovers that he can tunnel beneath the fence and into Auschwitz.

Speaking of which, how was he able to spend so much time speaking to a Jewish kid? Where were the guards? Why didn’t the kid just climb under the fence and escape? How had a 9-year-old living in Berlin in 1942 never heard of Hitler? And if his father was high up enough for Hitler to be paying them house visits, why wasn’t Bruno in the Hitler Youth? And why, at the end, do the Nazis randomly gas an arbitrary group of Jews that happen to be standing together instead of specifically targeting the sick, the elderly and the unfit to work? Weird.

Click here to buy The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Michael Morpurgo – An Eagle in the Snow | Review

Title: An Eagle in the Snow

Author: Michael Morpurgo

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 274

Rating: 9/10

Michael Morpurgo – An Eagle in the Snow

Disclaimer: While I aim to be unbiased, I received a copy of this for free to review.

This book was cute, and a quick and easy read – I powered through it in a day. It’s set during the Second World War, when a young boy and his mother are leaving Coventry by train and they come under attack from German aircraft. The train pulls into a dark tunnel and stays there to wait for the attack to pass – in the meantime, a strange man tells the boy and his mother a story, about a young soldier in the First World War.

In many ways, this reminds me of a book that I read a little while back – Snowbound, by Bram Stoker. In that book, travellers pass the time by telling each other stories, in a similar plot device that we see here. In both cases, it was used to great effect, and although I didn’t give this a ten because I thought it was a little cliche in places, it was still technically very well written, as well as well executed with the incorporation of some fantastic illustrations. And besides, this book is designed to be read by parents and kids, and to teach them about the futility of war from an early age, without exposing them too much to its horrors. There’s a lot of history to be learned here, too.

So go out there and buy this book – it’s lots of fun, and you won’t regret it.