This was an extraordinarily beautiful book. It's powerfully written, I could almost feel the war and the loss through 16 year old Midge Macpherson. Midge is from New Zealand and is at a finishing school in England when World War 1 begins. Because they want to help, Midge, and her friends Ethel and Anne, leave school and start a canteen in France, giving sandwiches and hot chocolate to soldiers passing through the train station returning from the front. Here the girls get to know and become friends with soldiers as they are injured, patched up and returned to fight the war of attrition. But, as the war goes on, men are in short supply to run the ambulances and Midge joins the lorry brigade, ferrying the injured to and from the make-shift hospital and trains. The suffering she see's strengthens her character and swiftly changes her from a teen to an adult.
It's a hard war for the girls and it transforms them considerably, when they return home nothing is how they remembered it and what was important before is now meaningless. The book is sad, but it's so well written that you can see the beauty in the bleakness. Jackie French should get an award for this book and it should be read in schools. It says more about the loss and utter destruction coupled with the sheer bravery and dogged determination of people who were in the Great War than any history text can emotionally get across.
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