ABSTRACT

A writer's sense of place is unique. Reading literature across cultures enables British children to appreciate the repercussions of the war in the lives of children across the world. The Second World War is still – just – within living memory, there is a vast corpus of texts written for children set in the war years. A revealing introduction to this subject is to invite pupils to consider the fates of two children, one real and one imagined, in the pages of the prize-winning picture books War Boy by Michael Foreman and Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti. Each author's sense of time and place – since the physical setting of many of these books plays a key role – animates an interest in individual histories and echoes of past. Racial persecution bridges the curriculum and is of immeasurable significance in human history.