Gerard Whelan
The Guns of Easter
O’Brien Press, 1996
Paperback, 166pp, €8.99

ISBN 978-0-86278-449-2

and

Elizabeth Laird
Oranges in No Man’s Land
Macmillan Children’s Books, 2006
Paperback, 116pp.  £6.99 / €8.70
ISBN 978-0-330-44558-0

 

A difficult subject, war remains a common theme in children’s books. Such adventure stories appeal to writers and readers because they suddenly place you in the shoes of characters facing extremely bad situations, while their historical settings provide a safe distance to explore highly emotional experiences. They also offer a subtle way of examining what adults deem important.

With so many tales set during war, from The Iliad to World Wars I and II and even more recent conflicts, it’s natural that war novels share similarities. Consider Gerard Whelan’ The Guns of Easter, and Elizabeth Laird’s Oranges in No Man’s Land. Whelan’s is the first in a trilogy exploring Ireland’s Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War, while Laird’s stand-alone piece happens during the Civil War in Lebanon. Both relate adventures of a child protagonist navigating unavoidable, dangerous excursions.

In Whelan’s book it’s 1916 and Jimmy Conway’s dad is away, fighting in the British Army. His Uncle Mick is with the Rebels, and his mother works hard to keep the family going. Set over the days just before and during the Easter Rising, the twelve-year-old’s loyalties are divided as he crosses the city, dodging army patrols, shootings, and disruption. Desperate to find food for his family, Jimmy encounters good and bad on all sides, and acquires a more mature understanding of himself and his relatives, and the struggles of his country.

Laird’s protagonist, ten-year-old Ayesha, must cross the Green Line on a forbidden journey through civil-war Beirut to get much needed medicine for her granny. This book also depicts delicate and long-established relationships between individuals from different religious and ethnic backgrounds damaged by a forcibly divided society.

Both books have many parallels. Their naive protagonists must both find paths through a war-torn city, negotiating with individuals on different factions of the conflict, while simultaneously finding everything familiar becoming unfamiliar and unexplainable. Missing parents, divided families and communities, changing loyalties, taking risks for loved ones, and a discovery of common humanity on all sides of a deadly conflict: these are recurring tropes in Jimmy’s and Ayesha’s exploits.

Although set during conflicts decades apart, in cities 3000 miles from each other, both novels follow the classic structure of children’s adventure stories, with realistic, sympathetic depictions of characters and settings. They are enthralling, immersive books that deserve to be widely read.

While Guns of Easter is for a slightly more advanced readership, with Oranges in No Man’s Land being shorter and having fewer historical facts to comprehend, it’s rewarding to explore both simultaneously with children. Together they work well in mixed-ability classes of intermediate readers.

Pat Ryan