Customer Reviews

On the Home Front: Growing Up in Wartime England

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As I listened to Mrs. Stalcup's book, "On the Home Front," I was sucked into a world of Spitfires, Hurricane Bombers, and the Little Ships bringing soldiers from Dunkirk to Dover. Tears were shed when soldiers were lost in battle, and there was rejoicing when a major battle was won. I saw blood, I saw tears, and I saw glory.

It was quite an experience for my classmates and me. We had an author reading her book. Sometimes she would choose a student to read certain chapters because they were so emotional for her, such as the Little Ships and the Spitfire Funds.

It was an amazing book about a young girl who was living during World War Two. But the most amazing paart about it was who was reading it - the little girl from the book!!!!!

Stalcup shares her memoir of growing up in the town of Lydney, England, during World War 11. Ann stays with her parents and experiences war as it comes to her community with evacuees, German prisoners, Australian food packages, and American soldiers. Short, succinct chapters, enhanced by personal and archival photographs, make this a book to be savored as a read aloud or when read independently. Stalcup imparts the flavors of every day English life such as four o'clock tea, sweets, walks in the country, and the pleasures of a front garden, and how they are changed by a world at war. She retells moments of her life, from the age of three in 1938 with her first gas mask to V.E. Day in 1945. This factual memoir complements historical fiction titles such as Pearson's The Sky is Falling, Bawden's Carrie's War, Heneghan's Wish Me Luck, and Garrigue's All the Children Were Sent Away. Stalcup takes the reader's heart and mind into various events sharing humor, fear, courage, and community spirit. Thoroughly researched facts in combination with thoughtfully remembered experiences, make this compelling account a great starting point for curriculum dealing with war and a welcome addition to children's and youth's nonfiction collections. This first book of Stalcup's shows the beginning of a new children's writer with great potential.

Mrs Stalcup, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading "On the Home Front." My wife got it in the mail a few days ago and I pounced on it and read it that evening. The subject is one in which I am very much interested and I found your book extremely informative, well-written and the most interesting I have ever read on the subject. Thank you!

I wished this was longer and went into greater depth of the little things in life that changed during war time. There were some very interesting items, that unlesss you lived during those times you just wouldn't think about (driving without headlights at night, why street signs had to be taken down). It provides details of life at the time that only someone alive to live it could provide.

This memoir shares one woman's experience of what it was like to grow up as a child in England during the Second World War. The book has received several literary honors, is used in classrooms and can be appreciated equally by both children and adults. Stalcup has a simple, beautiful way with words. Her stories are both enlightening and fully engaging. These are not the brooding, heavy experiences of war. Instead, they are a glimpse of what it was like to be a normal child living as normal a life as possible at this time. I couldn't put the book down. And when I had finished it, I felt I'd gained a new perspective on one of the most monumental events in modern history.

As Juvenile Literature, I suppose the book isn't bad in terms of its approach; as any sort of history, however, even for the American market, it falls well short because it's riddled with errors of fact and perception. This, despite the uncredited, but apparently heavy, reliance on Angus Calder's "The People's War" (Cape, 1969). It's no defence to claim "this is what I remembered" if the book purports to be a picture of "Growing Up in Wartime England." A better sub-title would have been "the middle-aged memoirs of a sheltered little girl." Stalcup is 20 days older than me and what I remember of WW2 in Britain is somewhat different.