SuitabookFive children on the Western Front
Kate Saunders
- Reading
- Consider reading alongside the child, pausing after shifts between home and wartime settings. Talk about how a character’s position shapes what they notice, and allow space after scenes involving danger or absence.
- Themes
- War and its human cost: The children encounter the war through soldiers, sailors, nurses, factory-workers and people left at home; shortages and empty seats affect domestic life. The wartime setting is used to deliver an anti-war perspective and to stress individual and family consequences rather than treating conflict as adventure alone.
- Magic, responsibility and change: The Psammead returns with a serious purpose, while its history as a desert god includes slaves’ deaths and a later attempt at redemption. The creature’s past is presented critically, but the story also allows for remorse and transformation; magic therefore carries moral as well as escapist weight.
- Changing roles and expectations: Anthea attends art college and becomes a nurse, while Jane struggles against convention to become a doctor; other characters enter military roles. The reported trajectories present women pursuing education, professional work and medicine as significant forms of agency within wartime change.
- Worth knowing
- The war brings emotional weight, family disruption and military danger. Combat is described as not graphic but not softened; loss, shortages and empty places at home may still feel upsetting.